A fairly improbable set of circumstance have been occurring me to over the last ten days.  A few weeks ago, my father told me that I should see “An Inconvenient Truth.”  He used to have a Ziggy cartoon where a caricaturized philosopher stated, “The truth will not only set you free, but it will also scare the be-jesus out of you.”  I loved that cartoon, as a child, and it still has great meaning to me today. 

I was in Seattle for a convention two weeks ago, and I scheduled a red eye flight home.  By the way, this was a terrible mistake; they don’t call it a ‘red eye’ for nothing.  I was rooming with a great friend of mine, who like me, is a Systems Engineer and views the world from a Scientific Perspective.  He is also a man of great Christian Faith.  In the course of a walk to the convention hall, we were discussing the particular difficultly reconciling a Systematic Mind with deep Faith.  This led to the first in a series of events that I could consider to be “divine circumstances”.  Here are the events that I recall in their particular order: 

·    My friend mentioned the book Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis.  Not two minutes later, he pointed out a young woman reading it behind a desk.
·    The next day, having accepted that something divine may have happened to me, I prayed, and I don’t pray often.  I prayed about what God wants me to do with all the marvelous gifts that I have been given.  I specifically remember stating, “If I have to face St. Peter, I don’t want the account of my life to be the accumulation of wealth.”
·    Before my 12:30 AM flight home, I planed to see X-Men III at a movie theatre by my hotel.  When I arrived, the movie was not playing at all, but there was a showing of An Inconvenient Truth.
·    When I arrived home on Saturday, I turned on the television while I rested.  Within 2 or 3 hours, the Discovery Channel Special “What you need to know about Global Warming” poped on the television.
·    When I felt sufficiently guilty about my impact on the environment, I went to investigate what I could do to help offset my carbon footprint.  Eventually, I clicked my way to American Forests and I found a link to their study of Jacksonville, my home town.
·    On Sunday, feeling that something divinely inspired is definitely going on, I go to the Unitarian Church.  There Allen Tilley of UNF is discussing the impact of Global Warming on Jacksonville.

Now remember this is in less than 10 days.  So now I need to evaluate whether this series of events was just an alignment of media conscienceness around Global Warming, or there was something more here.  Only time will tell.

Given that I am a man of fairly deep faith, I want to believe that this may be a divine purpose in the story of my life.  I guess I can’t complain.  I was praying for this, but I think I was expecting something a little less daunting.

So this is the birth of the Global Warming Category on my blog.  I expect that this will be a relatively well populated category, given that fire and brimstone could result in my ignoring this particular facet of my life.  J