Wonder

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Dave Burke

To “wonder” can mean a couple of different things. We wonder when we are curious, as in “I wonder what tomorrow will bring.” We also wonder when we are presented with something amazing and we experience awe.

I wonder a lot.

With a biology degree and a career in engineering, it’s not surprising that I am geared toward wondering about things. I come by that curiosity naturally. While I was growing up, my Grandpa Burke and my father both exhibited an infectious desire for knowledge of all sorts. There’s SO much to know about the world and so much of it is truly amazing!

Our boys were born into a wondrous age. The World Wide Web didn’t go public until after Gerrit and Tucker were born. DVDs and Google both arrived after Philip. Facebook only came into being in 2004. Now it’s hard to imagine life without them. As fast as things are changing, it’s reasonable to wonder what the world might be like when our boys are grown.

We often speculated about this around our dinner table . Read more »

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Wrestle Time 2

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Dave Burke

Once our boys got to high school, wrestling became more of a special event than a regular thing. It’s hard to say exactly how we knew each time that a wrestling match was called for, but the need for it was usually obvious to all the parties involved. Sometimes it came after a couple of hours of strenuous homework when they just needed a break. Other times it came because there was tension between us. Regardless of the reason, someone usually declared “it’s ON!” and the preparations would commence.

For the most part the preparations involved clearing the area of disinterested people (Mom) and the dogs that were too interested and wanted to join the fun. Furniture that might be a hazard was moved out of the way. There was also personal preparation that involved taking off watches and glasses and removing good shirts that we didn’t want to get ruined. It was quite the production and the beauty of it was that by the time we got this far into it, the original reason for the whole thing was often already forgotten. Read more »

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Moving Mountains

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Dave Burke

We devoted a lot of time to laying a foundation for our boys’ faith as they were growing up. We read Bible stories and prayed each night before bed. We went to Sunday school and church each week. We tried various forms of family devotionals. We brought the boys along when we served meals and went on mission trips. We spent many a family dinner conversation discussing the spiritual implications of things they heard in school or from their friends. As they got older we wrestled with the beliefs of other faiths, and what our responsibilities were to address the things that are broken in our world.

The Bible teaches us that if we “train up a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not depart from it,” and that was, of course, our hope for our boys. Still, Karen and I understood that we had each come to where we were in our faith over the course of decades, so we didn’t feel the need to rush things for the boys. Building any kind of long term personal relationship involves sharing a certain amount of “history” together, so it is understandable that building a meaningful relationship with the Almighty takes some time. It was important to us that our boys have the time to do just that.

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The Driving Contract

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Dave Burke

When I turned sixteen and got my license our family had two cars: the family car and the one my dad took to work. I was allowed to drive either of them, provided I had a good enough reason and it wasn’t inconveniencing someone else. That was pretty much the situation with most of my friends too. Hardly anyone my age had their own car. The few who did made the most of it, while the rest of us “made do.”

I did my best to compensate for this lack of a vehicle to call my own by doing things to customize my parent’s cars. Sometimes my efforts were appreciated, and sometimes not so much. One of the biggest handicaps of my dad’s commuter car was that it didn’t have a radio. It wasn’t broken or anything, it just never had one. That seems odd now in an age of iPod inputs and satellite radios, but back then even cassette tape players were rare in cars. Mostly it was just AM/FM radios with mechanical buttons to select the stations. In my circles your “coolness” depended a lot on which stations you had assigned to those buttons. Assigning the leftmost button to the edgy rock station was a sure sign that you knew what was happening.

Driving a car that didn’t even have a radio made it a little tough to prove much of anything. Read more »

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The Internet

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Dave Burke

Our first experience with the internet came back in 1993. Those were the early days of the World Wide Web when most folks were connecting using either AOL or CompuServe. Connecting required the use of a phone line, so a large part of the competition between the two companies had to do with which had the most local telephone numbers. The more numbers they had in your area, the better your chances were that your modem would be able to get a connection instead of a busy signal. Using any of the numbers outside your area meant long distance charges. There were a few 1-800 numbers available, but your chances of getting through on one of those were pretty slim. Read more »

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