I am the first to admit, the older I get, the more jaded I become.  Growing up, I learned quickly promises may be made but people would do things to ensure those promises wouldn’t have to be kept.  They might sabotage a vehicle so it wouldn’t start to avoid having to attend a social gathering they didn’t want to attend.  Or they’d pretend being sick to excuse themselves (and our family) from having people over or going to a dinner they had arranged for all of us to attend.  Other times, circumstances such as poor weather and extreme cold prevented an event from happening, which would be disappointing but understandable, considering the circumstances.  And then there were promises made by classmates … “if you run across the flooded school yard, even if you fall, we won’t laugh.”  And so, wanting the group to like me, I ran across the half frozen mud puddle, stepped on a frozen piece of ice and felt my foot slip out from underneath me.  Of course the whole group of people watching laughed then ran into the school.  Two teachers met me at the door.  I’m not sure where they found the towels and change of clothes for me to wear but I was sent home with a note explaining I’d fallen in a mud puddle during recess.  As for my “friends”, I asked them why they laughed at me when they said they wouldn’t.  “Well, it was funny” the spokesperson of the group said.  “But you promised!”  I reprimanded with a voice filled with hurt and anger.  She laughed again.  “It wasn’t a real promise, my fingers were crossed.”  So I learned the hard way that promises could be made, and broken, with no repercussions.  It is a lesson I’ve carried with me all of my life.  And, perhaps one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in my life thus far, I gained that day,  when I vowed to myself I would never make a promise to anyone that I couldn’t keep.  Not even a promise to myself.  And since that day, I’ve had plenty of reasons to question whether someone had something crossed while they made pledges and promises to people that simply never came to fruition.  As my mind sifts through the many people who I know broke promises, I reject examples from people who seem to make a job of lying…. Lawyers, politicians, celebrities and the like.  I think these just might be people who always cross something so they never have to be held accountable for anything they say.  In those instances I would say don’t just look for people crossing their fingers, they’ll cross their toes, ankles, legs, arms and eyes to get out of taking responsibility for their words.  And when that fails, they’ll simply apologize for the “misunderstanding” and walk away, wiping the incident from their memory as they do so.

I’m not a fan of a liar to begin with, which stems from a different incident that I don’t wish to rehash in print or bring forward in my memory. Suffice it to say it is a memory that I can no longer learn from but it still has the power to bring me a lot of hurt.  So, to make peace with it, I’ve accepted I can’t change the situation but I CAN stop reliving it.  As someone who detests lying, even by omission, I was contacted recently by a person on social media who acted friendly enough - maybe too friendly - but, as I “listened” to what they typed in their messages, I knew I was being lied to.  It took four days but in six short conversations I learned the person who was “from Texas” was actually from Africa and wanted someone to finance schooling so they could become a lawyer.  Not only was I suspicious of this person from the beginning of their correspondence but some of their phrases and wording simply didn’t jive with the persona of being from America.  That’s an unfortunate fact for scammers… they’ve never been to America and what they know of our culture they’ve learned from television and the internet, in all its various forms … so they can’t make up a realistic sounding lie that can truly reel a person into believing what they have to say.  In this instance, the scammer admitted he was lying and said his name was Famous.  Now, I’m not a mean person in general but I’d tried to shut down and move away from further contact from this person in three different ways.  He told me his name and I responded, “You’re going to be very “famous” amongst your peers when you end up in jail for pulling scams such as this.”  To avoid further requests for a friendship from him, I blocked this person.  I’m not quite sure how he was able to directly contact me as I don’t accept “friend” requests from people I don’t know (on my private/personal) social media accounts.  However, it’s not just people over the internet we interact with who bend the truth.  Even in our daily lives, there are people who don’t even blink when they are dishonest.  I’m not talking about a “white lie” or anything to do with tooth fairies, rougarous, the Easter bunny, Santa Claus or Cupid - those are traumas waiting to happen for parents who’ve taught their children not to lie only to have their child find out their whole childhood was based around lies celebrated at the holidays.  No, what I’m talking about is the person who sees a new, expensive vehicle in a public parking lot and holds up a set of keys, takes a selfie picture and posts it as their “new ride.”  The vehicle doesn’t even belong to someone they know.  Then there’s the person who asks to try on an expensive ring at a jewelry shop, takes a photo and claims it’s a “new” reward they’ve gifted themselves for a job promotion.  Moving from a back office to one nearer the front while doing the same job  is not a promotion just as putting a ring on one’s own finger long enough to snap a photo doesn’t make the bauble a personal acquisition.  Sometimes the things people do to give an illusion of their “perfect” life just makes me shake my head at their audacity.  What’s wrong with being honest?  

It’s unfortunate that we humans rely so heavily on education rather than what we see with our own eyes and know from our learned experiences.  These past weeks my phone has buzzed with weather warnings alerting the public to be wary of weather conditions.  I’ve watched the angry storm clouds gathering in the sky as my phone vibrates in my hand, the urgency of the warnings becoming more and more profound.  Hundreds of kilometres away, the storm lashes out at anything standing in its way and we, fortunately, remain unscathed in our area.  But the fact that we haven’t seen the projected storms makes me wonder if people are even listening to the alerts anymore.  

“Red at night, sailors delight. Red in the morn, sailors be warned.”  Have you ever heard this old saying?  It’s made in reference to the sun set and sun rise.  If the skies are red at night, the weather will be pleasant and calm.  If the skies are red at sun rise, it is an indication of stormy weather about to come.  I used to check the weather forecast daily, as my day began.  Over the years, like the weather alerts, I’ve learned to become more careful of how much confidence I place on weather forecasts.  If it’s clear skies with no clouds outside my window, there’s very little chance I’ll believe the forecast that says we will have rain for the day.  However, when I glance out my window, go outside and feel the hot heat of the day as we experience a heat wave and I listen to how quiet my surroundings are, I’m more likely to believe we could really have quite the storm if conditions develop.   When I was about eight years old my family and I were staying in a ten person Woods canvas tent at a popular camping area just outside of Regina.  It was early July and it had been a beautiful, hot day.  There was a bright sun in a cloudless sky so, after our full day at a conference, us children enjoyed ending our day with a swim in the pool before getting ready for bed.  The air was hot and humid.  As we washed our face and brushed our teeth, I asked my Mom if everything was okay.  She asked what I meant and I replied, “The birds aren’t singing.”  There were so many birds that I actually noticed they’d stopped singing.  When I was in bed, I heard my parents talking outside the tent then they sat in the van, listening to the local radio.  Soon after, my parents came inside the tent for the night and they told us there might be a storm but we were together and we’d be okay.  It was a tremendous storm.  Later that morning, as we drove into Regina,  we witnessed flooding of underpasses, saw trees had been flung through the air as if giants were throwing sticks while playing fetch with their dog, the wind that had made our tent billow like was breathing left anything in its path damaged beyond repair.  I had lain in my bed, listening to the wind and lightning that crackled with electricity, reaching for the hand of the person sleeping nearest to me, needing some extra security to feel safe.  The whole outer edge of the tent was soaked with water as we woke up to a bit of a flood around out tent but none of our blankets were wet.  We were so fortunate to have lived through that tornado.  Walking to the main bath house, it felt surreal to see the trees collapsed in a tired heap on the ground, where only hours before they’d stood proudly, reaching to the sky.  The people across the lane from our tent had a tree trunk lodged in their windshield.  The pool had damage and the bottom of it had heaved, unable to hold water any longer.  But no one died.  That was the fortunate thing - people lost a lot, just not their life.

Science plays a huge role in our everyday life, even today.  Lately I’ve been thinking about how much we undervalue things until science provides us with an explanation that we can accept, and then our appreciation for the unexplained grows.  When my knees ache in a certain way, I know we will have a major weather shift in three days - it usually means cold weather with either rain or snow, depending upon the season.  I’ve stopped mentioning this to people because I was accused of being “clairvoyant”, a description I take offence to.  I am not, and have never been, clairvoyant.  I do read the signs nature gives us to make educated guesses on what will happen.  For instance, sun dogs usually are a precursor to storms.  The further the sun dogs are from the sun indicates the number of days before the storm will arrive.  The closer to the sun, the sooner the storm will be.  I already spoke about listening to nature - the birds’ silence usually indicates something is amiss and further investigation is required to see if precautions must be taken.  I also watch the trees.  Usually, when we are going to have rain, the poplar leaves will blow in the wind and expose the undersides of the leaves.  All these things are guides I use to predict the weather.  Is it some sort of sorcery? No.  It’s similar to the techniques used by scientists and weather forecasters to predict what the weather will be like later today and further down the road this week.  I would never attempt to predict what the weather will be ten days from now however, it’s summer, so if pushed I COULD say the weather ten days from now will be milder than it will be if we were in the month of December.  I can say, with a great deal of confidence, if we have precipitation it will be rain rather than snow.  But I won’t attempt to use science as the sole basis for my forecasts.  You may be surprised by that however, here’s my reasoning.

We live on a planet in a solar system that requires light years for information to reach us.  If something significant happens on the planet Jupiter, by the time anyone on earth sees it occurring in “real time”, it actually happened 40 minutes ago.  Earlier today I was reading the news about an asteroid called Asteroid 2022 OK5 that is considered by NASA to be potentially hazardous to the Earth since it passes so close to our planet… it’s “just 3.41 million kilometres” away, travelling at a speed of “18 kilometres per second.”  Scientists are studying the Asteroid using radars, which means if NASA hadn’t reported it, the asteroid isn’t even visible to the naked eye here on Earth.  With this information combining with my knowledge of speed of light … given the time difference between the asteroid, the speed of light, and humans actually seeing the asteroid on radar … hasn’t the asteroid passed before we’ve even seen it coming? And since we CAN see it coming, light years after it passed, wouldn’t that mean we ARE fine and still alive?  No great disaster befell us as our most educated humans on the planet alerted us to old news that didn’t even affect us.  For me, do you know what the real kicker is, Science enthusiasts?  (This is the part that kind of amuses me since I don’t consider myself a product of evolution either).  When people find out we are safe from this asteroid, and any other threats like it that miss our planet, they collectively inhale a deep breath and exhale a sigh of relief as they exclaim, “Thank GOD!”  Because as much as people rely on science to answer most questions, and to explain the unexplainable, when it comes right down to it, an asteroid causing a Big Bang ruining our planet isn’t something most of us worry about due to our personal faith in God.  We know He will protect all He has created.  And for this reason, I really question Science and all the information we learn as we study it.  Sometimes, perhaps it’s better to be ignorant of facts rather than base ones life activities on an educated guess made while someone’s eyes were crossed and vision was blurred.  I’m so skeptical anymore when I hear a weather forecast or read of another potential calamity facing the earth, I just think to myself, “really, Science? Really?!?!?”  And I feel okay knowing faith will get me through thanks to a light years delay in receiving the news that could potentially ruin us.  Sometimes, perspective is everything!  Whatever we are facing the rest of this day, I hope the best for you in all that you encounter.

Take care and have a great week, everyone.