The Kepler Telescope is now awake and peering deep into its designated star field. The target area has been carefully selected and will hopefully be a target rich environment. It will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars for telltale signs of planets. Kepler has the unique ability to find planets as small as Earth that orbit sun-like stars at distances where temperatures are right for possible lakes and oceans.

The mission’s first finds are expected to be large, gas planets situated close to their stars. Such discoveries could be announced as early as next year.

“…in the meantime i want you to write a list of those events past and present which might logically be termed NOT God’s will. ”

The above was a request by a respected mentor and friend in response to my previous post “Is it still God’s Will?”  To discover what something is, it is prudent to determine what it is not. A good approach, but as I worked through the list below I found it surprisingly difficult to decide. I decided to let free form thinking take control…not analyze my gut reaction too much and just see where my first reactive, automatic thoughts take me. So this list will be just the highlights, the teardrops in in the ocean.

Things I say are not God’s will:

PAST:
1.The publication of The Secret and the spiritual exploitation it represents through its deceptions as to what constitutes true science.
2. The editorial liberties that have been taken with the Bible, to the point where “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is not actually the correct context, according to one who is more in the know than I, and that apparently the original spirit of the law here was “Thou Shall Not Murder”, which of course excludes actions taken in self defense and war (depending of course on which side of the gun you are on).
3. The things I said to myself today when Kevin’s wife e-mailed me a picture of the memorial bench that will be placed next to Kevin’s grave.
4. The Crusades.
5. The failure of His chosen people to “finish the job” as it were in the book of Numbers.

PRESENT
1. The use of Marriage as a foundation for a tax code, or worse.

2. The prayer chain e-mails I get that perpetuate the belief that if 1 prayer is good 1,000 are better. As if getting God’s attention is a numbers game.

3. My growing belief that God may have taken Kevin to Him in order to test Katherine and Kevin’s twin brother Kendall to prep them for something even worse yet to come. I’m probably just paranoid.

4. Joel Olsteen. Sorry, but God is not a cuddly kitten and no, things are not going to be alright if you “just believe”. In fact, Christ is pretty clear in the book of Mark that more likely is just the opposite. I believe the man’s good intentions could do more harm than good in the long run to Christianity.

5. Giving in to contempt and becoming jaded, instead of trying to see if this situation might be a way to reach a greater understanding of faith.

Ok, that’s the list. Perhaps the following thought could be tabled for now, but at some point I need to come back to it as it seems relevant to the question, “What is NOT God’s Will?” The thought is this:

I believe the Bible is where God’s nature is to be found, but still God did create all of this. Does that make it logical to conclude that by observing the universe around us we are, in some way, seeing into the mind of God? Could not then the sight of a baby seal getting beat to death against a sandy shore by a killer whale be construed as an unfiltered if not ominous communication? Not sure if the concepts that built this thought logically belong together. Just following my gut as promised.

With the sudden death of a very close friend recently, Kevin Wood, only 33, from unknown and immediate causes, a lot of things went through my mind. When we found out he was an organ donor and his bone marrow was a match that saved the lives of 12 children and that his eyes returned site to another, we firmly believed that whatever caused it was clearly God’s will. It was so sudden, he literally dropped dead right in front of two paramedics at Taco Bell.

But now we know what happened and it really stings. My friend was mis-diagnosed back in November when he visited his doctor for chest pain and shortness of breath. I believe he had a fever at the time as well. Regardless, the doctor in question treated him for a lung infection, instead of examining his heart. He died of a viral infection of the heart, and as it turns out this could have been successfully treated with no problem on a regular course of antibiotics.

Now, do we still believe it was God’s will? When it was mysterious it was much easier to make the attribution. Perhaps guilty of what civilization has been doing since the beginning of human kind, we attributed the mysterious to God and the known to science. Does God take life in this manner, or is it the natural consequence of the natural order He created…and therefor indirectly still his will (or as some would say, His fault).

I will choose to believe that ultimately it was the will of God. I don’t understand it, and I know God owes me no explanation for anything He does. However, that being said I am not OK with it. I am glad these people were helped, even saved their lives, but what of Kevin’s  14 year old son, 10 month old daughter and 2 year old daughter? What of his beautiful and fully devoted wife of 4 years whom he, just that morning, had swung around in the kitchen laughing and telling her how much he loved her? No, I’m not fine with this at all.

From Jim Fanson, Kepler, JPL Project Manager :
Kepler’s calibration data collection is drawing to a close. Several hundred data sets have been acquired to characterize and map the optical and noise performance of the telescope and the electronics for the focal plane array (the area where light is focused). The data sets are now being analyzed on the ground. Optimally shaped “windows” of pixels will be defined for each of the more than 100,000 target stars and a table of these pixels uploaded to the spacecraft. These are the pixels that will ultimately help the science team find planets — the pixels will be downlinked to Earth and used to construct light curves, or measurements of brightness over time, for each star.

After science observations begin, the data analysis “pipeline” at the Science Operations Center at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will process the light curves to identify “threshold crossing events,” which is the first step in identifying potential transiting planets. Various tests will be applied to these events to weed out false indications. Once confidence is built for candidate transits, observations by ground-based telescopes will be performed to further rule out phenomena that can masquerade as transiting planets.