Inge Thinks...

And we’re back. After your beautiful thoughts on Dr. Jason Lisle’s talk I will now disturb them with some consumerism. After that morning at the conference I went to a teeny-tiny mall near the hotel where I bought some gifts for the family and then I went to an ice cream store. You all know how much of an ice cream lover I am, and since I hadn’t had one in .. 4 days? I really needed one! I figured I’d take a small one, because they’re probably ‘a bit’ bigger than they are in Holland. So the dude (really nice dude) gave me my ice cream and seriously it was huuuuuuuuuuuge! That thing was like an XXL ice cream here in Holland, haha. So after that I could go on a little longer without ice cream. When I went back to the hotel we decided that we wanted to go to the outlet store where I bought awesome Tommy Hilfiger shoes for 20 dollars (which is like 15 euro), so super cheap! After that we were off to Gatlinburg, a very cute and super tourist little town, were I took about 200 pictures (haha) and then we had some jummie pizza at The Pizza Hut. That evening we went back to the conference were we had another session, but this was more like a sermon. Nice, but not very interesting. Back home I fell asleep right away.

The next morning we woke up really early for an early morning speaker, Bil Jack. Honestly, I didn’t like this one very much. Apparently, here in America, Christians are somewhat anti-environmentalists. If you say that you don’t want to eat meat because they slaughter the chickens in an inhumane way, they say: well, they’re animals and the Bible says we are supposed to rule over the world. If you say that you don’t want to drive a huge car everywhere because that might not be so good for the environment they say that CO2 makes the trees grow? Well anyways – I do care about nature and though I’m not a nature-freak I still believe that it is important that we take care of this earth. Yet the Bil Jack guy was totally making fun of it, barely using the Bible and mainly just using oneliners and a whole bunch of screaming. So definitely not my thing. I actually was pretty annoyed by this session and I was glad it was over.

After that I went to a teenage thing on fossils, which was fun but not a whole lot of new stuff and after that I went to the coolest thing of the day. There was a session on archaeology and it was SO awesome because the dude just seriously had archaeological evidence for so many things in the Bible. They had proved the existence of Jericho and many other biblical cities and so on. And he wasn’t just talking about the evidence but he was actually showing it! Só cool! I really loved this one. After that we went to some more climbing in the Smokey Mountains, but I made sure that this was mainly walking and not hiking (: Then we had dinner at Chic-fil-A, which is SO awesome! It’s a Christian restaurant which isn’t open on Sundays, were all the employees are Christians and were there’s Christian music on! And all of America eats there because it’s so jummie, hihi. Real cool. That evening part II of the archaeological session, so real awesome again, and then sleepies!

So the next morning we woke up a little later and packed all our bags and at eleven we checked out of the hotel and went to the last two sessions of the conference. I didn’t really like the first one but the last one was by Ken Ham, and it was pretty awesome. He wrote this book, Already Gone, and it’s about why all our teenagers are leaving the church. He found the answer. It’s because we only teach them the love and hope of Jesus, while they actually have all these questions about evolution and the age of the earth. But in stead of providing them with biblical answers to these questions we just say: ‘Oh Johny, it’s ok. Just believe what the secular scientists say, as long as you trust in Jesus!’ All we say is ‘trust in Jesus’ and we don’t provide ‘em with the answers in Genesis, while that is what they actually need.

After that we got in the car for a four hour drive to Cincinnati, Ohio, but our hotel was in Hebron and that’s in Kentucky. Over there the aunt and the two babies were there and the grandparents. Now the babies are really sweet, don’t get me wrong, but if you have to sleep in one room with them – they’re not. That night was a sleepless night. Next morning we went to The Creation Museum with the grandparents. Then I mainly walked around there on my own and took a whole bunch of pictures of everything. It’s a real cool museum (: There’s also a planetarium and that was I think the coolest thing. In there, you know the huge dome where the projection is on and you’re under there in a relaxed seat, they had the DVD of Dr. Jason Lisle (remember him? he’s cool) about stars and planets and that was reaaaally beautiful. I totally bought the DVD and tons of other gifts there to take home. After that we all went together to eat pizza at Uno’s, that was jummie.

The next day the aunt, the babies, the grandmother and I went to the petting zoo of the museum. That would have been nice if it weren’t for the terrible heat. Seriously – it was SO hot. But I did see a zorse and a zonkey! (Google that) After that we went to see another Planetarium show and then (finally!) got some peace at the hotel. That night we had dinner at Big Boy and that was reaaally jummie.

Evening came and went, sleepies and morning arrived. We woke up early and me and the brother went in the car with the grandparents for a looong drive to Memphis. There we met the aunt’s sister and husband, and they are a bit more like our age, so we spent the evening there playing Wii Games and Mario Kart. That was a whole lot of fun, after all the seriousness and grown-up-stuff we had had for the last week. I never knew Mario Kart could be so much fun (: That night we went to sleep at the grandparents but I couldn’t sleep that entire night because it was so terribly hot. That really sucked, especially because the next day would be water skiing with the young couple! It was a whole lot of fun, I did it, I was really scared, I really worked on my tan and got home utterly devastated. There we had some jummie spaghetti that the grandmother made and after that I went straight to bed, being soooo tired. I slept better that night, got up early in the morning for a very long ride to Dallas where we finally, after 8 or 9 hours, arrived. Ate pizza, slept.

And that’s where I’ve been the last two weeks! I spend my time mainly reading Lord of the Rings at the pool and I’ve finished the three volumes by now. I also went to The Dallas Museum of Art, the Hawaiian Falls Waterpark, Downtown Dallas, the mall, the huge supermarkets, saw Inception, Starbucks, stargazing and probably a whole bunch of things I forgot. I also have been baking pie and cakes quite a lot, and I spend much of my time putting babies in to car seats, giving them milk, changing their diapers and putting them to bed.

In three days I will be flying back, I will leave Saturday evening and come home Sunday evening. I actually am glad that I can go home, because even though it’s all been a wonderful experience I long for home. I long for a nice brown sandwich with some cheese, normal milk, potatoes with vegetables and not ten tons of meat, my own bed and no crying babies. But most of all I miss Joshua <3

Yet I am very grateful to my uncle & aunt for this amazing trip, so – thank you! It has been an experience of a lifetime, I have learned a whole lot, I have seen a whole lot and mostly I had a whole lot of fun. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Well, I’ll see you Dutch guys soon! Xoxo,

Inge

Hi there! So here I am, still in residing in the terrible heat of Dallas, to bring you the second part of my incredible journey so far over the oceans. The last thing I talked about in the first part was the beginning of the conference, so, that is where I will start this second part.

First, we had to go to registration where we got cool name tags. Apparently I’m Inge van Eck and my hometown in Dallas, Texas. (Yes, I had to explain to quite a lot of people that I was actually from the Netherlands and not really from Texas, to the disappointment of many.) After all the fuss was done we went to the main hall and found some seats near the front. The first speaker of that night was Ken Ham, the CEO of Answers in Genesis and the owner of an incredibly awesome Australian accent. His talk was mainly about what he called ‘The Genesis 3 Attack’.

In Genesis 3, satan, in the form of a snake, tries to make Eve question what God really said. ‘Did God really say that you couldn’t eat from that tree, Eve?’ And that was the beginning of all the trouble. According to Ken Ham, that’s basically what the devil has been doing ever since. The Genesis 3 Attack, the ‘Did God really say that..’, has always been around and every century has had its own version of this. Today’s Genesis 3 Attack is, according to Ken Ham, the age of the earth. Because, the Bible states clearly that the earth and all living things upon it were created in six days and then, if you add up all the ‘this son of that dude bore this dude who lived for 300 years and then bore this dude’-you know, you will get about 4000 years to Jesus. Add 2000 until now and tada, the earth should be about 6000 years old. Yet, all the secular scientists say that the earth is way older than that, it is supposed to be billions and billions of years old. And this is where the Genesis 3 Attack comes in. Because God says that the earth is young, and the secular scientists say the opposite. And then the devil whispers in our ears, ‘Hey, you young student. Are you sure that God said that the earth is 6000 years old? Because all these scientists say otherwise.. I think that maybe you should read the Bible differently..’ And in come all these theories about how the days of creation were actually all a 1000 years or how there was a world before creation and blabla. Doubting the word of God. And once we start doubting the word of God, there’s no holding it. Because if we don’t believe that Genesis is really true, why should we believe that Jesus actually died for us? And gone is our entire faith.
So that’s mainly what his talk was about, accompanied by funny pictures and slides. He had some funny things to make his point about the six days of creation being really days. Everywhere in the Bible where it says ‘yom’, the Hebrew word for day, we automatically assume it’s a day. No-one questions that. But when it comes to Genesis, a day all of a sudden is a thousand years? But why should it only be a thousand years in Genesis? I mean, if a day = thousand years, then Jonah should have been in the whale for 3000 years (funny picture of really old whale and Jonah) and Joshua should have been walking around Jericho for 7000 years (funnier picture of Jonah and all of the Israelites with incredibly long beards) but everybody thinks that’s weird, right?

The second session of that night was by Dr. Andrew Snelling, and while Ken Ham mainly told us that the Bible declared a young earth, he showed us that science declares a young earth. He had some really cool evidence, I will try to show a few of these to you, but I do not guarantee understanding.
- So, we all know galaxies – right? We know that these things have these cool spirally arms that wind up around them. The thing is that the outer part of the galaxy turns faster than the inner part, so the spirally arms wrap themselves up, to put it bluntly. Assuming that these arms have always been winding up at the same speed, the earth never could have been billions and billions of years old, because all the galaxies were supposed to be ‘wound up’ by now!
- Another one. We know that the earth has a magnetic field, and assuming that the rate of it losing its energy has always been the same (which is losing half of its energy every 1400 years), the earth could never be older (and this is a maximum) than 20.000 years, because all of its energy would have been gone by now!
- This one is easy. We know that there is salt in the sea, and that there is salt added everyday. If the earth is to be billions and billions of years old, the sea should have been a lot more salty by now.
- DNA material decays real fast. We know that blood and cells do not survive long, even in really good conditions. Yet, there are scientists who claim that they have found blood of bacteria who lived billions and billions of years ago. Yeah, right.
And these are just a few of the ton of arguments Dr. Snelling told us about. So interesting!
You may have noticed that there is quite a lot of assumption in there. And that is true. In science there are always assumptions to be made. A very common assumption is the fact that a process right now happens at the same rate as it used to do thousands of years ago. So, say if I eat a sandwich in half an hour now, humans who lived 2000 years ago ate that sandwich in half an hour as well. This is one of many assumptions that can not be proved, because no-one was there to check it out, right?
So therefore whenever scientist, secular or christians, ‘prove’ something, be careful. Because nothing can really be ‘proven’, since there are always assumptions involved. That’s why this scientific evidence can be used to help people believe, but it should not be put above the Bible’s authority. Faith comes in at first place, an whatever science discovers should always ‘match’ the Bible. If it doesn’t, that doesn’t mean that the Bible is wrong, but that means that our science is wrong.
Thus, do not rely on evidence but rely on your faith. If evidence seems to match that, wonderful, if not – faith!

Well, you might understand that after all of this I felt pretty tired. So when we got back to the hotel I was happy to find my four pillows still there and I immediately fell asleep. The next morning I first when to a session which was especially for women, but I didn’t really like that. The session after that was by Dr. Jason Lisle, and he was SO amazing. My goodness, I loved that guy. He’s like a supernerd (graduated summa cum laude) yet he is able to put even the most difficult concepts about stars and galaxies and whatever into simple and plain language so that even I, anti-science-Inge, could understand it! He was being real cool and starting from Galileo’s book on the discovery of some planets and stars, The Starry Messenger, he showed us how the universe declares God’s glory. I was overwhelmed – I never knew the universe was that big. You know, we are a tiny spot on the earth and the earth is a tiny planet in our solar system, and there are a whole bunch of these solar systems in our galaxy and then, this is what amazed me most, there are a whole bunch (like trillions billions gazillions) of galaxies that form our universe!
So seriously, go take an hour or something, grab your laptop and sit on the couch for a bit. Go google things like universe, nebula, galaxy or star and just look at God’s amazing creation. Wow. I just fall into silence. God is so great! It’s like Psalm 19:1 tells us so beautifully: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the works of His hands.’ Wow.

And I think I’ll just stop here now. Because I want you to think about the glory of God and the amazing work of His hands. Be amazed. Glorify God.

[click the photo for a bigger view]

‘God, who hung the northern sky and suspended the earth on empty space.
God stores water in clouds, but they don’t burst, and he wraps them around
the face of the moon. On the surface of the ocean, God has drawn a boundary line
between light and darkness. And columns supporting the sky tremble at his command.
By his power and wisdom, God conquered the force of the mighty ocean.
The heavens became bright when he breathed, and the escaping sea monster
died at the hands of God.

These things are merely a whisper of God’s power at work.’

- Job 26

Wow. Amen.

Howdy there, dear readers!

I am allowed to say howdy now, because I’m currently residing in Dallas, Texas. And I believe that Texas-people are cowboys, and cowboys say howdy. Some of you know that I left The Netherlands almost two weeks ago for a journey to the great land of the free, and now, here I am. After a week of running and driving around like crazy, I’ll now have to weeks of peace and happiness by the pool of my uncle’s house. I will, of course, tell you all about my life here and I will start at the very beginning. Photos will follow later, and with later I think I mean a whole lot later, but I’m not sure about that. Anyways – it all started on that Saturday morning, nearly to weeks ago when Joshua and I, still sleepy, got into the car on our way to Schiphol..

We first left Schiphol for London, which was a rather short, but also quite funny flight, because all of the stewards were male. Me and my very little flying experience thought this rather funny, especially when they came over and asked everybody for drinks in their cool English accents. My brother was sitting next to the window so he could see London, and I just pushed my camera over his face hoping I’d get the London Eye on there. (I did, actually!) We arrived at London, late, so we had to hurry into this bus which took us to another terminal. There was this strange lady who tore our boarding passes apart and gave us new ones for no reason, and after that we walked real fast to our flight to Chicago, which was already boarding. This flight would take eight hours, so armed with my Lord of the Rings-book I settled myself into a seat, wearing a thick vest and covered myself in the blankets that were on the seats. The good news was that there was this cool screen on which you could watch movies (I watched The Last Song, it was pretty), the bad news was that there was a lot of turbulence and that sucked. I think I got some sleep, but I was pretty tired and I was feeling a little weird when we finally arrived in Chicago.

Over there it was superhot and we had to wait forever in line for the stupid custom guys (who told me that when I would go and study art history, I’d probably end up serving fries at the McDonalds) and our suitcases. Then we were kind of lost, and were not, walked through half of the airport and finally arrived at Gate 20, only to find it had been changed to 3 and so we had to walk the entire way back. Yeah, we love airports. After the short flight in the teeny-tiny airplane we arrived, tired and feeling a little lost, in Memphis.

There, tons of family was waiting for us. There was my uncle (who’s Dutch) and my aunt (she’s American) and her two cuuuute kids (like supercute-cute), also my aunt’s sister, her husband an her son and also my aunt’s parents. We drove to the house of the parents, drank coke, spent some time talking and had a lot of fun laughing at my brother’s strange Scottish accent (he’s Dutch, so..?) but I was very happy when I could lay my head down on the soft four pillows that were on my bed.

The peace didn’t last long though, because the next morning at 8.30 we had to leave for an eight hour drive (or something) to Sevierville, Ohio. There, we would attend the awesome Answers in Genesis-apologetics-conference. We were pretty tired when we arrived at the hotel and after we settled down for a bit I was about to experience my first American fastfood restaurant. We went to Ruby Tuesday and I got myself a burger and some fries while I was wondering about the nice waiter who was all like: ‘Hey, how you doing?’, because our waiters don’t do that. When we got back to the hotel I only remember my gigantic bed and the four pillows I so longed for, after that, it’s all black (:

The next morning, after sleeping in for a bit (finally!), I was about to experience some more weirdness: the American breakfast. These crazy people somehow love everything hot and toasty while they’re eating it at 8 o’clock in the morning. I’m not kidding, Americans eat hamburgers for breakfast. I settled for some yoghurt, fruit and orange juice, feeling kind of a loner eating that food. Then we went into the town and I was just laughing out loud. Seriously. There’s like a gazilliontrillion billboards everywhere with big shiny neon things and a hundred of attractions at the side of the road that are trying to be bigger than the thousands of fastfood restaurants that look like a forest so dense. I was seriously scared, at first. It’s SO big and everything is just SO huge. Really, really scary. And funny, haha. So when we passed the wilderness of billboards we got close to the real wilderness: The Great Smokey Mountains.

And that’s where the adventure really began. We went hiking to some place called The Chimney Tops. So when you know me, you are probably like this: ‘Inge, you probably mean walking.. Not hiking!’ That, my dear friend, is a very logical thought. Inge + sports activity = not happening. Yet, it did. I actually hiked to The Chimney Tops, and honestly, it was terrible. The climb was sooo long and sooo heavy and I just felt terrible, so terrible. When we made it to the top, there was more horribleness, because before you could make it the real top, you’d have to climb this. Yup. Well, I got half way before totally freaking out. It was cool though, and the way down was a lot easier. We stopped at this mountain river and we just totally relaxed there for a long time. So gooood! We drove down, got some MacDonalds driveby food and then went to our first night at the conference..

More about that in the next blogpost! Bye for now <3

Jeeeeeej! I’m so happy! This summer, July to be exact, I will dwell in the United States of America, for a month! My uncle and aunt live in Dallas, Texas, and they invited me to come stay with them, which is really, really, real-ly sweet! Thank you <3

I will attend the Answers in Genesis conference in East Tennessee, which is awesomeness. I will also visit The Hawaiian Falls Waterpark (which is like, gigantic dude), a Cattle Drive in Ft. Worth, a visit to the Creation Museum in Ohio AND I will go to Memphis for a weekend!

Everything is just so cool and I’m really, really excited!