Laying Foundations

About three months after my birth, a new chapter was opened in an inheritance dispute that had been underway for at least several millenia. The origin of this dispute, between groups of people claiming common descent from the patriarch Abraham, is shrouded in a fog of conflicting claims and historical documents of varying credibility. However, the intensity of the dispute in recent times is beyond question, because the founding of the modern state of Israel at midnight on May 14, 1948 triggered an immediate demonstration as armies from several surrounding Arab states converged to strangle the new state "in its crib". The initial attempt to terminate the new state failed, as have the several followup efforts over the years, but the hostility shows no signs of diminishing 58 years later, and instead is merging with many other such disputes of long standing around the globe to set the stage for what could be another century of conflict even bloodier and more destructive than the worst of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, a few years before this, in fact two days before August 6 1945, the day when an American B29 bomber (affectionately named "Enola Gay" by its crew) inflicted the world's first nuclear bombing on the city of Hiroshima in Japan, my wife was born in a small hospital in Mankato, Minnesota. Her father, a Marine pilot serving in the Pacific, learned about her arrival a few days later by telegram along with news of the surrender of Japan and the formal end of the war. He returned home to continue his military career, graduating from prop driven fighters to jets, serving in Korea and through successive stages of the Cold War up through the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and into the early years of the Vietnam conflict. My wife and her sisters got to know many parts of the country as their family was moved from one air station to another, in North and South Carolina, California, Alabama, and Virginia. As her father retired from military service in 1964 and began a new career as a high school English teacher, she began college where her parents had studied, met, and married, and there she met me.

Over the same period of time, my parents also moved our family around quite a bit, from Princeton New Jersey to Ponca City Oklahoma, to Spokane Washington and finally to St. Paul-Minneapolis Minnesota, as my father found employment in various industrial research facilities contributing his specialized knowledge of solid state physics and the analysis of the atomic structure of matter using the then-new techniques of X-ray crystallography. My parents had saved up as much as they could to help my sister and me pay for a college education, but in my senior year, we were fortunate to hear of a full tuition scholarship offered through an academic competition run by a local school, Hamline University. I entered the competition and became one of the ten winners selected for that year.

So, we both ended up at Hamline University where we met, got to know each other, and married in the summer before my last academic year. We started our family soon after I went off to graduate school , where I studied mathematics in some depth for six years, finishing a Ph.D. and commenced a teaching career as a professor at another local liberal arts college, while wife honed her "estate management" skills (the latest results of which are on display at our homestead, where she designed, lined up the the contractor, closely monitored the work, and finally moved us into our beautiful new home in the fall of 2003 - a true Prov 31 woman!). In the midst of those studies, we encountered Jesus Christ, publicly identified with a local congregation of His church, and thus became involved as interested parties in that third great body of people staking a claim to the inheritance promised to the patriarch Abraham - the Christian congregation, the Body of Christ. Since that time, we have been working out the implications of that claim and its meaning for our lives.

This blog is one more attempt to pursue that meaning in a more productive way, and thus discover and fulfill the purpose of our lives. Wife is way ahead of me, having written and published (to our extended family) an autobiography that, so far, runs to several hundred pages of text.