So, he's preaching from the Epistle for the day, which I gather somebody a few hundred years ago said SHOULD be the Epistle lesson on this particular Sunday. He's in Corinthians where Paul is talking about the thorn in his flesh, which God arranged for Satan to harass him with, to keep him from getting too uppity over the vision of Paradise he had 14 long years before.
Now, I've heard people say that "you should never get too happy with your situation or pleased with your life, because God will have to come along and smack you - send you tragedy - to bring you back to reality." And I usually think "that's nonsense, God doesn't do that kind of thing, doesn't send you tragedy because you're too ecstatic about your life." But boy, in the divinely inspired Word from today's lesson, which is infallible, without error in the original languages, it certainly sounds like that's what He did to Paul - spot on, in fact. "...to keep me from becoming too exalted" he puts it. Hm.
Anyway, the preacher used that illustration to describe our lives on earth as if they were AC, alternating current, where the electrical charge goes out from the power source to the end of the circuit and then returns, back and forth, back and forth, a bazillion times a second or so. Or thereabouts. Approximately. :)
Negative/positive/negative/positive/negative/positive, etc.
Except our lives alternate from failure to success, from tragedy to victory, from ecstacy to despondency, from joy to grief, from hope to despair, from plans destroyed to dreams realized, acceptance to abandonment, from frustration to ease, from encouragement to discouragement, etc., etc. His point was that God sends the times of great pleasure to help us get through the times of sadness that are inevitable in this life, AND that the difficult times are also sent from Him to keep us both humble and dependent on His grace.
It made me think, as a statistician would (good grief! during the sermon yet!) of statistical distributions. The normal curve. I suppose an engineer would think of an oscilloscope and accomplish the same thing, but I like my example better.
The normal or "bell" curve has as much of the probability on the left side as on the right - it's symmetrical. See below:
Random events (or at least events that APPEAR to be random to our eyes - but that's another discussion) fall equally on either side of the middle (the 50th percentile of probability and the mean of the distribution.) The shaded areas represent standard deviations from the mean. And in the Standard Normal curve, one standard deviation around the mean contains about 2/3 of the events that happen. 2 standard deviations (2SD) contain 95% of the things that happen.
This curve describes lots of natural phenomena, and we can see a lot of life events happening this way, too. Good stuff, bad stuff, happy times, sad times, mostly falling fairly close to the middle ground, the "happy medium". I think people differ, though in what their "medium" is. I know people whose "medium", whose normal setting, is NOT at all happy, but rather blah or even morose. And I know others whose medium is almost giddy compared to mine. Seems like those with a "medium" that's pretty positive could stand to help those whose medium is not so upbeat...
But does God "set" the mean of the distribution for people? Does He set mine different from yours, by the events He sends into my life? Does He push for "balance" and "symmetry"? The yin needs the yang, etc.? If not, then what is Paul talking about? Is his experience normative or unique?
Then I got to thinking (and I can here some of you say "and just when was this, during communion?" - noooo. During the canticle for the day which tune I didn't know. Sorry.) about another statistical principle. Kurtosis. Kurtosis, I said! Not ketosis as in the low carb diet phase when you are burning fat and your breath tastes like aluminum foil, no... Kurtosis.
Kurtosis describes how tall or flat the curve is. In other words, how close are most events to the middle? With some people, the events in their life don't vary a lot from the "middle" - they don't have wild highs and brutal lows. They just kind of go along without a lot of variation from one day to the next, one month from the next, one year to the next. They live in the same place for a long time, work for the same company for years, have the same friends, do the same things. Their curve is tall. See below:
Others have a flat, broad, curve, where the events of their lives are spread quite far from the middle. What's normal for these people? Change, I think. Big emotional swings, too, maybe. Over the last couple of years, I have felt like the kurtosis of my life has been changing, making the distribution even flatter than ever before. Big swings in emotions and in life events. I think I still have a "normal" setting, but I'm not sure what it is anymore. I suppose I cross paths with it from time to time as I'm swinging by the middle on my way to something else that's extreme...
I think I could go for a little more height in my curve, God, ok? And the middle? Could you push it a little more to the right, please? Thanks for listening. I'll just wait if you don't mind. :)
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