April 6, 2063. The Day After First Contact.

I'm sure Star Trek fans will appreciate my message today -- I couldn't celebrate First Contact Day yesterday because it was Sunday and I wasn't here -- about this banner event forty-eight years from now! From the best Star Trek movie with the Next Generation cast (Picard, Riker, et. al.) in my humble opinion, Star Trek: First Contact with the Enterprise crew stopping the mechanical all-assimilating Borg from changing Earth history has something in it you might overlook in all the action. Someone, perhaps: Zefram Cochrane, the human developer of warp drive, the faster-than-light drive that makes interstellar travel (and that selfsame civilization) possible. To the people of the 24th century where Picard and crew are from, Cochrane's hailed as a hero, one man with a vision who brought humanity out of a new Dark Ages in the 21st century. But he didn't start out that way at all, and certainly didn't intend to be. For more details, I urge you to watch the movie.

Being the slightly bungling historian I am, I ask you: how many people from three centuries ago or even more recently do we hail as conquering heroes and if they have flaws overlook them in favor of our own prejudices? The "Founding Fathers" of America's own history, the writers and signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution ... forgive me, but the more I hear of what is and what is not "Constitutional" (you can almost hear it said with a capital C) the more I hear people's brains fall out. Of course we should honor the accomplishments -- and the accomplishers -- of our past that we can learn something from, but it behooves us to not lionize them to the point of everything we can possibly accomplish is just going to be in their shadow. Didn't even Jesus the Christ say "Greater things than I have done you will do"? I'm paraphrasing John 14:12 here, and while we're not called to be saviors who die on the cross to take away the sins of the world,

we ARE called to accomplish, within our sphere of influence and our ability to do, something that will make this world better for our having been here. Which brings me to this Easter weekend, which I would like to say was an astonishing breakthrough change in my life, but I'd be lying. Or maybe I just really wanted to lie down ... I got home from work at Marketplace Saturday afternoon, and I know Jeffrey wanted the four of us -- him, Sarah, Martha, and me -- to go to the park "as a family" but I was just too tired after getting up at five thirty in the morning to get ready for Breakfast with the Boys at church and writing out a devotional passage in my journal before that and the workday itself (which was less busier than I expected on Easter Eve); during my lunch I learned that Marketplace was treating its employees to Pizza Hut pizza and pasta that afternoon, then a taco bar another employee had brought in the fixings for that afternoon, so I ate well. And drank, and was merry.

(NOT Mary, whom I have both as an aunt in Kentucky and a sister-in-law in Minot!) So we were supposed to go the park sometime after church and the annual Easter gathering at Robert and Sharon's -- Martha's parents' -- house; however, light snow flurries came down and after a while did not melt as they hit the ground! So the egg hunt the youngest four cousins (our children Sarah and Jeffrey, with their older cousin Josceline and their youngest cousin Trevor) participated in with scattered help and photo-taking from the older siblings, aunts and uncles, and family friends was dusted with the white stuff. Which is still around as I type this at 1308 hours CST, though no snow is falling now. Slipped and almost fell a few times on the paper route this morning though, because it has a nasty tendency to cover the ice. Sixteen of us, including fourteen immediate family and two friends, made Easter dinner and just some hanging out time awesome!

Oh, that and Jesus rising from the dead. OUR first contact with eternal life, David