Immortality

The Turritopsis Jellyfish can age backwards, from adult to baby, and can do so infinite times. If threatened by disease, starvation, or other crises, it can revert to a blob of cells in an embryonic state. Those cells can differentiate into whatever cell is needed- a cell that started life as a muscle cell, can become a sensory cell, for example. The catch is that this process can only happen when the Immortal Jellyfish is under some sort of stress or danger. Old age alone will not allow it to defy death and go back to the jellyfish cradle. It can and will often die of old age.

My son sent me this information yesterday morning. I know he is close to finals time in his second year of law school.
"Taking a break from studying?" I asked, as I perused the Immortal Jellyfish article he had just sent across the gmail chat box.
"No, in class," he typed back.
"Is the professor discussing Immortal Jellyfish? No, I didn't think so...."
Good to see my son taking his studies so seriously...

But the article was intriguing. I wonder if scientists have hopped on this little fountain of youth and dissected just what mechanism triggers this process. If they bottled it, it would be more valuable than diamonds. And why, why, why did God waste this miracle of eternity on a jellyfish? Of all the creatures that I would love to see bounce back from mortal injury, the jellyfish is not on my list. Inscrutable. (Good SAT word, Asherel, look it up.) God's ways are clearly not my ways.

I have been increasingly convicted that I know nothing of God. I believe He is real, I believe He loves us, I believe He speaks to us, but the more I know Him, the less I really understand Him. So why have I spent two years every single day writing about His messages that I believe He is transmitting? I don't know. I don't understand that either. I just feel I am supposed to.

But immortality to a jellyfish? I mean, jellyfish don't even have brains. All they have is a loose network of nerves called a nerve net. They don't have a backbone either. Why, why, why did God give immortality to a brainless, spineless blob?

Let us reason together here, Lord.
Careful, mortal one, remember, you do have a brain and a backbone. Do you really want to be a jellyfish? 
Well no, that is not the point. You are the creator. You could have made the jellyfish die and us immortal.
Yes, and were you to live on forever in the state of rebellion and sin you are currently exhibiting, do you think that would have been wise?
Well, do you have to phrase it in such a negative way?
Or even kind?
But Lord, the jellyfish can't even know or care that it is going to live forever. We humans do!
You humans don't value what you can't lose.
Now that is just not true! I value sunsets, and the sound of waves crashing upon the beach, and the trillium blooming in the forest....
That's because you are mortal. Remember, even the poet said, " And since to look at things in bloom,  fifty springs are little room, about the woodland I will go to see the cherry hung in snow."


I paused in my musings. He could be right there. How many times have I tried to cajole Asherel to go out on a walk with me on a beautiful day and she refuses,  answering, "There will be more beautiful days..."
What if there really would not be? Would we never appreciate the beauty we have if it were never to end?

Besides, mortal one, lest you forget, I have given you immortality. But I have given it in a way that only a creature with a brain could capture it. It has to be a choice. The jellyfish has no capacity for choice. You do.

Romans 6: 3-8, 22-23
³ Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴ We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
 ⁵ For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. ⁶ For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— ⁷ because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.
 ⁸ Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. ⁹ For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. ¹⁰ The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
²² But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. ²³ For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Rules are made to be kept

The parking lot on the corner normally is filled with cars, but on this day, I turned in to see a giant swimming pool full of sparkling water, a dock attached to it, and hordes of wet dogs carrying toys in their mouth. Happy dogs were shaking water over owners and passerbys, all here for the annual Dock Dog event.

This event is a combination of aeronautics and canine show. The dogs race down a dock, and then leap into the air over the pool, and try to fly further than all the other dogs. The longest flight I watched was over 22 feet by an attack police dog. (Note to self: avoid trying to outfly attack police dogs.)

I asked the three judges how on earth they could determine how far the dog had leaped. It is so fast that I could not imagine how they could look at the measures marked along the pool side quickly enough to determine how far the dog had gone in the air.
"It is most accurately measured by the tail bubble," I was informed.
"Tail bubble?"
"When the dog lands, his measure point is at the base of the tail. That also creates a bubble in the water and so we look for where that bubble is."
This sounds remarkably imprecise to me, but I asked if it was ok if I stood with them and tried to see the tail bubble since they made it sound like an ironclad measure.
"Sure, just know we may run you over."
Why not? In the pursuit of scientific inquiry, this was a small price to pay.
So the next dog leaped and I peered over the pool edge with the 3 judges. There were millions if not trillions of bubbles, as you can imagine when a large dog leaps 20 feet through the air to land in a pool.
"Which one is the tail bubble?" I asked, but I was ignored. The judges were pointing and writing and what is even more miraculous, they came to within inches of agreement.
Risking their wrath, I asked, "How accurate do you think this is?"
"Accurate enough," they said, "At Nationals, they use special video cameras and can be more exact, but those are $50,000." One judge had a pierced chin with a clever fashion statement of pushing his beard through a ring attached to the piercing. It was like a beard ponytail.

I meandered over to another table to find out the order of events, when suddenly the people I was chatting with looked up with horror, and every one of them shrieked.
"OH they are sooooooooo out of here!" cried one of the shocked workers.
"I can't believe he did that!" yelped another. I was forgotten as all 5 of the workers were shaking their heads, pointing at the pool, and registering varying degrees of abject horror and disgust.
What had I missed? Had someone strangled a dog? What on earth had happened?
"I'm sorry," said the worker, turning back to me, "You just never ever do that."
"What did he do?"
"He threw his dog in the pool."
"That dog will never go off a dock again," said another shaking her head sadly.

Now I tried to register the same degree of horror, but actually, I could see myself throwing a reluctant dog in. I mean, they know how to swim. What is the big deal? But uniformly, the Dock dog people equated this with ripping the heart out of a living animal and taking a bite.

I remember the same degree of horror when I used the word "butt" in polite company. I was a rude Northerner, unused to the refined and genteel South when we first moved here. I was also younger and stupider. It  didn't seem like a bad word to me in the North, but it was considered uncouth clearly in the South. I try not to use that word anymore, as I don't desire to give offense when possible, but it is so hard sometimes to know all the rules. Had I been on the dock with my dog who refused to jump, I would have given him a gentle nudge. And I would have been booted from the contest, and an eternal pariah to all of Dock Dogdom. So much can hinge on knowing the rules.

I think that is why God made salvation so easy. He gave us the 10 Commandments to see how we would handle those, but almost instantly, every one of them was broken twenty times in the first five minutes. We as a species are notoriously awful at following the rules. So the Jewish religious authorities decided to add a whole bunch more rules so maybe we could walk the straight and narrow path a little more accurately. But all that created were more rules to break.  Finally, God could stand it no more and said, "Enough! You are throwing too many dogs off the dock, and what I really want you to do is let them fly on their own. So I will make it simple. Just admit you can't follow the rules, even just a few for even just a few moments. You will never be a good Dock Dog handler on your own. Admit it, and let me take over. Trust in me and let me carry away your sin. That is the only rule you need to know."

This is not a perfect analogy, but it will do for my purposes. Rules are not made to broken. They are made to be kept, but we just can't.....not with any consistency. And rather than boot us from the contest, God gives us a way to stay in it for all eternity.

John 3:15-17 (New International Version)

¹⁵that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
 ¹⁶"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.