Phil was reliving his father’s trip across the U.S. in a journey on bicycle, a grand trip some people take to relieve grief and pain.  He probably chose the bike to come closer to his father’s 1961 motorcycle, now in 2022.  It was one lone trip, relieved by the kindness of one or two random strangers, such as when he crossed the Continental Divide.

A trip to relieve grief was featured in the 1938 Ladies Home Journal, a trip which crossed Afghanistan and risked becoming a concubine for the heroine.  Philip may have read about it in his 7^th grade literature book.

Humankind is programmed to work out its destiny here in a copy of the way of Calvary, and they do it with courage and determination.

When we pray and the world suddenly gets cheerier, we know we’ve hit pay dirt in the mine.  Why?  Because God doesn’t keep his children in suspense forever.  Go by what a kind father does, and you have an idea what the heavenly father is like.

There is the question of what his only son endured.  But look at the outcome—the son raised from the dead, humankind redeemed and Western Civilization projected into the future.

God knows better than we do what we can endure or take.  He won’t go beyond our ability.

We often tire of prayer and become desolate from repetition, but what is repetition to God but the playing out of his evolution?  I mean, isn’t repetition part of the evolution God created to make humankind?  I say repetition, and you may find this boring, but it is how we learn.

Unless things are repeated, we can’t become familiar with them.  At least not ‘til the point of boredom.  That is the mystery of learning.  But keep it fresh, keep it rejuvenating, and something will  come of redundancy.  Is that not what comes of our days on Earth?

And is prayer not the precursor of greater things to come?  Stick with it to its fruition.

The Holy Spirit seems to inspire the young pro-life women, something the New York Times interviewer almost missed.  But she didn’t write the headlines; the article was good and thorough.                            

They are free thinking women, unmoved by a biased media, and faithful to their ideals.  God bless them.  They don’t want to kill humans, and they want to help the women who are contemplating that.

We have an idealistic generation coming up, and I pray for them.  I only ask, how else can I help them?

From him I learned my basic physics, probably because he taught it so well.  We called him “Brother,” for he was a Marist Brother of the Schools.  He spoke with a French-Canadian accent, though he was from Massachusetts.  We used to kid him about some of his pronunciations, but he got his subjects (Physics, Chemistry, Geometry, and more) across with class.

It is not every day that you meet a teacher like that, who can make a subject come alive, and make you want to major in it in college.  Unfortunately, I was color-blind, and because of things like the spectrometer, colleges don’t educate color-blind physicists.

But he did his job.  We didn’t have to use the spectrometer (we didn’t have one) and I got good marks.  I still pray for him in gratitude.