It was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, not the Bible, that said “Change is the only constant in life.” He said that in the time of Isaiah! That was 500 years before Jesus, when, in my mind, things didn’t change that much. We quote Heraclitus nowadays because so much changes. And in a post-Einstein world, we kind of think that everything changes, even our understanding of the truth, that everything is relative. And that everything changes. There are no constants that we can count on.

But even Einstein believed in constants. Remember that famous equation E=mC2? The C of that equation stands for Constant. Light, as far as Einstein was concerned, is constant. The Bible nods its head at that idea too.

Physics suggests that there are several constants. Look up Planck’s Constant – it’s fascinating. And incredibly precise. The constant speed of light is likewise precisely measured: 186,000 miles per second to be exact.

    The pull of gravity is also understood to be constant, but that figure has been elusive. A physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland by the name of Stephan Schlamminger has spent the last 10 years trying to ascertain that number, and the number he has come up with is different from everybody else’s ideas. Even the experiment that he was trying to replicate. Bless his heart. He called his endeavor “life-sucking.” You’ve got to feel sorry for a guy that spends 10 years of his life on an experiment that essentially failed.

      If something is constant, how in the world can you not measure it? I’m sure Dr. Schlamminger has asked himself the same question for the last 10 years. I don’t have the answer to that; he suggests that gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces, and… yeah, it got a little foggy for me after that.

      I don’t think, as he does, that just because you can’t measure it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Just because you can’t figure it out doesn’t mean it’s not true. Wait. Say that again…. Just because you can’t figure something out doesn’t mean that it’s not true. That is true for the tests and measures around gravity, but it’s true in the spiritual life as well. I will never understand how my mom lived as long as she did without food and water. Nor how her illness did not cause her pain. But her life during those months was real, and redemptive for me, and for many. Incredible, real things happened in those days.

      The inability to figure things out does not equate to failure. Schlamminger described his testing as a long walk through a dark valley (which has echoes of Psalm 23). Life leads all of us through some “valley of the shadow of death.” Those valleys feel like failures, and very well may be, but they do not mean the end, or that God is not with us. Psalm 37:23-24 says: “The Lord makes firm the steps of the one who delights in him; though he falls, he shall not be cast headlong, for the Lord upholds his hand.”

     I can give witness to that truth. Not all has gone well for me. My body has failed in rather catastrophic ways, for instance. And yet I can say that the Lord has made firm my steps, and though I have fallen, the Lord has been graceful to let me get up again, and again. A failed 10-year endeavor to come up with a number has to be tough, but not the end.

      And one last word. My experience of, and my trust in, gravity is unaffected by Schlamminger’s testing. When I put my cup down on the table, it still stays there, even if we don’t know precisely the force that keeps it from floating away. The constant is not invalidated by the lack of measurement. God told Micah: I the Lord do not change (Micah 3:6). Even though Heraclitus’ dictum seems true, it ultimately is not. God is constant. God does not change. God will always be faithful. You can count on that (pun intended).

Craig

This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. 1 John 1:5 (NIV)

  Trying to sleep at the end of a Hospice bed is kind of interesting. At least with this bed that they brought into my mother’s house, they install an articulated blue air mattress and then hang its pump on the end of the bed. Her comfy recliner ended up at the foot of that bed.

      As pumps go, it’s fairly quiet, but in the dark corners of the night you can definitely hear it. The perpetual drone of the pump can serve as white noise, a constant hum that nullifies the creaks and the cracks of the home settling for the night (and maybe some lingering conversations in your head).  But the mattress itself makes its own sounds as it pumps up or releases air, that brilliant breathing-like design of this hospital bed.

      If you’re sleeping at the end of the bed, it means that they didn’t bring the bed for you, and you are probably there because you love the person who is in it. For me, that would be my mother. My mother has moved with the ebb and flow of this mattress for three weeks now, three weeks longer than any expert (or amateur) ever thought.

       Somewhere near that end of the hospice bed your prayers change. You stop praying for that person, whom you love dearly, to get better, and you start praying that the Lord would let them go. In my mother’s case, that’s all she wants. All she wants is to go be with her Savior, a God that she has served all her life, a Lord that she firmly believes in with every now small inch of her being.

       At the end of the hospice bed, now with the sun shining through the living room window, conversations happen. Family gathers. Stories are told. Family stories are clarified and refined. Past blessings and hurts and questions get rehearsed and, again, clarified and sometimes healed. Forgiveness and perspective are given and received at the end of the hospice bed.

      There’s nothing decorous about the end of the bed. It’s not a desirable piece of furniture. But I’m glad it’s here, and that I am here. The comfy recliner next to the droning pump has been a place of conversation, but also of observation of my Mom. There I have sat and looked way beyond the now glassy eyes on my mother’s face, and into the collective memories of a mother and her son.  Like the rituals of having dinner every night with my Dad, but then just her and me doing the dishes. Every night, all week, every month for all the years that I could reach up to get dishes out of the stainer to dry, we talked and processed and bonded. I can’t say that I miss doing the dishes, but I now will forever miss those conversations that wiped clean more than dishes.

       It was at the end of the bed that I stood and prayed and said goodbye for the last time. There were tears, the tears of two brothers now hugging each other for consolation instead of her, and it was at that moment, when my brother leaned over to kiss her, that she produced the final liquid her body had, a small tear in her right eye. For all the sedation and the decline of all her abilities, her last gesture, without being able to talk or to move or even see, was to share a tear. One tear that became a torrent for me, tears of grief, but now that she’s finally let go, of gratitude. I am eternally grateful for that little girl from Altoona, PA who became a wife, then a missionary, then my Mom. She ended well. I will strive to do the same.

Carol Emily Nelson October 13, 1938 – April 25, 2026

                    If you wander about these parts we call downtown Boca much (which if you read this article, you probably do), you know that we have railroad tracks. Unfortunately for me, we, like the majority of people that call Boca home, live “on the other side of the tracks.”  Now, Old Floresta and Boca Winds and The Shores hardly qualify for the traditional understanding of “the other side of the tracks,” but, we do have to cross them. And since the advent of Brightline, the odds that you will be stuck waiting for a train has gone from “probably not” having to stop to “probably so.”  Particularly if you add the myriads of “ghost” trains that go through – the times the gates go down but nothing goes by. That’s a new rendition of “the lights are on, but nobody’s home.”

      The other day I saw something new waiting at the railroad tracks. Right there on Palmetto Park, a Brightline train roared northbound (I don’t think it was stopping in Boca), and a Florida East Coast Railway (FEC) freight train rumbled south. It was kind of exciting and interesting to watch them barrel past each other, a blur of color and light. It reminded me of a time Janice and I were riding a high-speed train in Spain, barreling down the tracks at 120-plus mph, when a train doing equal or greater speed passed us going the other direction. Blur doesn’t begin to describe that passing!

      Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s image of two ships passing in the night conjures a much more romantic image than the freight train in Boca. But that sense of missing connections still remained for me as I watched these two trains. Our lives get so full of demands (or perceived demands) on our time that we rush past a lot of beauty, goodness, and truth (to cite the transcendentals). We rush from one thing to another, yes trying to “stay in our lane” (two trains crashed on that same line Janice and I were on in Spain a couple of months ago), but in so doing we miss visiting with people, enjoying things that God has placed along the way, and losing ourselves in our own truths, instead of The Truth.

       In traffic, in the isles of Costco or Publix, in life, like the two trains at the RR crossing, I rush past too many people, too many opportunities for God to pour into me, and maybe pour into others. In slowing down, the transcendentals can pour in. Can we go slow enough to at least say hi to each other?

Waiting for the gates to go up,

Craig

Those who are kind benefit themselves,
but those who go too fast bring ruin on themselves. Proverbs 11:17