Genius.

Before I begin, I would like to say that this is officially my 101st blog post. So yeah, feel free to mail your gifts* to my CCU address, and I'll pick them up next time I sweep through campus.**

Also, many of you are probably wondering what my last post was all about. Basically, the head of my work has a Google web crawler which scans the internet constantly and trawls up any pages with the phrase "[Insert title of my last post here.]" So from now on, I won't call it [Insert title of my last post here,] I'll instead call it "E.C." It's no big deal that my boss found out about it, I guess, but it was just weird to walk into work one morning and have everyone comment on my blog...

Anyway, on to business.

* * * *

I went down to Texas a few weeks ago on my motorcycle to visit a very good friend of mine. It was probably the best thing for me at the time, because I was getting way too caught up in papers, studying, planning, and the like. My time in Texas was marvelous and it was so good to meet with my old friends. Robbie once said to me, "it's not like we're [Stacy and himself] going to be dead or anything. We'll just be in a different place hundreds of miles away." Yet when I hugged him that weekend for the first time in years, it felt like he had really come back from the dead. I had forgotten how tall he is.

My friendship with Robbie is the kind of friendship I hope to achieve with a lot of people. We picked up right where we left off, disregarding the two and a half years we had been apart. We exchanged stories, laughed, and delved into God's Word just as we had back in Nevada. It was great.

My second night in Texas, Johnny, Robbie, and myself went to a Phil Wickam/Charlie Hall concert at a church. Charlie Hall was alright, but Phil*** really made my night. He did so through a single song which has been in and out of my mind excessively as of late. It's called "Beautiful," and it is a praise song to God. The forth verse goes like this:

"When we arrive at eternity’s shore
Where death is just a memory and tears are no more
We’ll enter in as the wedding bells ring
Your bride will come together and we’ll sing
You’re beautiful"

When he sang that, I had such a vivid image in my mind of Heaven that my eyes began to tear up. It'd been a long, long time since a song had done that to me.****

* * * *

A friend of mine from back home recently blogged about being smart (among other things). It really caused me to think about intelligence, and about genius more specifically. I man, what is genius? I don't want the scientific answer involving IQ, rather I wonder about what true genius really means. I'll see people who are "blow-me-out-of-the-water smart," but then they go and do something really dumb, which leads me to believe that genius is not all about intellect. I'll see people reading books and books and books, without ever caring to write a captivating story with their own lives, which leads me to believe that genius is active. I'll see people who are super-smart acting callously towards others, which leads me to believe that geniuses interact with the world regularly. I'll see people who possess brilliance and use it for the sole purpose of furthering their own agenda, which leads me to believe that genius is to a certain degree about others.

I don't think I'll ever come to a conclusion about the true definition of genius, but I find myself recognizing genius most often when I see someone do something I can't do. When I saw Caleb on the Academic Team my freshman year answering obscure questions about European history, or when I saw Stephanie find the third derivative of sin(x) - cos(x) in about an eighth of a second or when I saw John Scott sawing on the fiddle or when I saw Hans swoop in from the rafters to block a basketball, I exclaimed to myself, "Wow! That is genius!"

I think about what beauty there is in genius. How it sort of inspires this reverence and awe and leaves a buzzing in the mind of those who witness it. Standing in that darkened church in Texas, next to Robbie, with the words of "Beautiful" being sung all around me, I couldn't help but hold back tears at the thought of God's genius.

However, as it is written: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him"
-1 Corinthians 2:9


Thanks for Reading,

-Daniel K



*Acceptable gifts include: A pack of wolves, a new bike, $29,000 in unmarked bills, a gyrocopter, and Pez.
**Which is something I try hard to avoid. It's way too depressing to see CCU sans-students.
***That's right. Phil. We're on a first-name basis and I let him borrow my motorcycle on Thursdays and weekends.
****In case you're wondering, the last time was Ray Bolts' "Thank You For Giving To The Lord," when Luke Everett signed it to us at Hume Lake. Talk about beautiful.