Many of us are aware of last week’s tragic news of the deadly avalanche in the California’s Sierra Nevada not far from Lake Tahoe.

The heart-rending story reminded me of the much happier story from 40+ years ago when Becky and I and a group of good friends set off on cross-country skis from Badger Pass in Yosemite National Park for a couple of days at Ostrander Ski Hut, ten miles and 3,000 feet in elevation gain away.  By the time we reached Ostrander, we, too, were caught in a winter blizzard and our two-day trip ended up being a four-day trip. We weathered the storm in the protection of the old stone hut and by the time we skied out through three feet of new snow, the sky was blue and the sun was bright.

Good times and a story we have told often. On that trip and other wilderness expeditions, one of our friends, who was also our leader, made wise decisions – at Ostrander to hunker down, and on other expeditions to turn back. I thank God for his wisdom.

In the wake of the sad news from Castle Peak, that leader, still a good friend and still wise, and I were texting back and forth remembering the Ostrander trip and other adventures (the photo above is from my days as a youth director when we took a group of our kids out to Dewey Point in Yosemite, 3,300 feet above the valley floor).

Yes, good memories and good friends.

But then my friend added, “These make me think, too, of our backpack trip over Deadman Pass, down to Thousand Island Lake, and up to Donahue Pass to scout out the X-C ski trip from Mammoth to Yosemite Valley. You were slip-sliding away off Deadman Pass on our side-hill traverse. Thought you were a goner for a couple of seconds.”

I don’t tell the story of my slip-slide on Deadman Pass very often, but it came back to me in a flash. Just a couple of seconds, and I don’t remember the how or why of the slide, but I remember thinking I might be a goner. As soon as my friend mentioned those couple of seconds, my mind raced back to the scene of our side-hill traverse of Deadman Pass. I felt the panic and the fear, and then the relief.  All was well and we still had a long way to go.

“All’s well that ends well,” Helena says in Shakespeare’s play that bears the name of her words.

Was there much to learn from my side-hill slide on Deadman Pass? I don’t remember the how or the why of it. Did I slip or trip? Was I distracted by an eagle flying overhead or a black bear on the trail ahead of us? What was I to learn? Be careful next time? Maybe. “All’s well that ends well” isn’t much of a lesson to learn.

John Savage is the president of the National Avalanche Association. One of the many news stories about the Castle Peak avalanche quotes Savage as saying, “Humans are fallible. We generally make logical, good decisions − except when we don’t. If you’re out…in the backcountry for many years, the law of averages dictates you will make some bad decisions. Chance, or luck, will determine whether, or how much, you pay for the bad decisions.”

I am not sure my human fallibility makes for generally good decision making.  One lesson I have learned, however, is that I need to rely on more than chance or luck to make it through this slip-sliding-away life. I still don’t know how my Deadman Pass slide began or why it ended just short of me being a goner. But I have learned that God’s grace is amazing. It has covered a lot of bad decisions.

Becky and I are planning a return trip to Brazil this spring and we are thrilled to be able to be a part of the thirtieth anniversary celebration at Igreja Presbiteriana no Jardim América! But the getting-there part of the trip can be a bit of a downside. Even with good connections, a flight from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, is 22 hours, 13 of those hours sitting on a plane – 10 hours overnight from Atlanta to São Paulo. I suppose we could be flying to New Zealand, but by any count, 10 hours is a long time on an airplane squeezed into an economy class seat. Well worth it, however. So I found a good itinerary at a decent price and booked our seats.

A couple of weeks after confirming our reservations, the airline began to tempt us with upgrades to premium economy and even first class. At first the price of the upgrades was ridiculously high and even the thought of being comfortable for those 13 hours was not enough to click “buy.”

But then it appeared. An upgrade to first class that was cheaper than the upgrade to premium economy. I checked the travel blogs and on a per hour or per mile basis, the price was deemed exceptionally good. I booked it and began to dream about that glass of champagne as we boarded our flight and ten hours in a lie-flat seat. Continue reading →

Our friends are concerned about raising their young children in the digital world, particularly the world of artificial intelligence. Yes, we know that AI is going to make all of us rich and heal every disease, but what if there is a downside? What if artificial intelligence, fake knowledge, makes us less human? What if it obscures the image of God inherent in our creation?

Since talking with our friends about AI a couple of months ago, it seems like I see an AI-related news story or commentary almost every day.

My curiosity was piqued, then, when I saw this Wall Street Journal headline earlier this week: Meet the One Woman Anthropic Trusts to Teach AI Morals

The column begins by telling us that the one woman “knew from the age of 14 that she wanted to teach philosophy. What she didn’t know then was that her only pupil would be an artificial-intelligence chatbot named Claude.

“As the resident philosopher of the tech company Anthropic, (she) spends her days learning Claude’s reasoning patterns and talking to the AI model, building its personality and addressing its misfires with prompts that can run longer than 100 pages. The aim is to endow Claude with a sense of morality—a digital soul that guides the millions of conversations it has with people every week.”

There is no such thing as a digital soul and there cannot be such a thing. Continue reading →

I have just finished reading a new book by Joseph Loconte, The War for Middle Earth. The subtitle is “J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm. 1933-1945.” It is a good book and I recommend it, though this will not be a book review.

As Loconte points out in a recent interview, for a generation of readers Lewis and Tolkien are not just authors. They are teachers and mentors. We remember when and where and why we first read The Chronicles of Narnia or Mere Christianity. We recall the thrill and the fear brought to mind by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The works of Tolkien and Lewis have helped countless Christians make sense of our world. We hear the call to go “further up and further in” as we come to our “real country” (The Last Battle). When tragedy or trial crash into our lives, we join Frodo as he laments the ring having come to him. Gandalf’s wise words answer our fear and anxiety as they answered Frodo, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.” (The Fellowship of the Ring). Continue reading →

As for many of you, this past week in Auburn, Indiana, has been filled with wind and snow and very cold temperatures. And lots of snow shoveling. At least for me. My neighbors might be correct to assume that I have some sort of snow removal obsession disorder. Not long after the last flake floats to the ground (or sometimes a little bit before it makes its final landing), I am out to clear the driveway and sidewalks of the wicked white stuff. Heaven forbid if I have to leave the garage while there’s still snow on the driveway. Those nasty ice tracks become deadly slip traps for the next many days. So, yeah, I am sometimes obsessed with ridding our hard surfaces of that frozen menace.

We have lived in the real snow country of the mountains of California and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where to let the falling snow get too far ahead of you is to never catch up.  I come by my compulsive behavior honestly.

Not all our neighbors share my obsession, however, as their sidewalks and driveways become obstacle courses of icy ruts and slippery concrete. Whether it is good for them to slip slide away on their way to work every morning is theirs to decide, however. Their inattention to the fine art of snow removal is not good for me, that is for sure. Filled with disdain and self-righteousness, I find myself judging my neighbor. Continue reading →