The Stop Sign, Part 5

The Stop Sign, Part 5

He said it with a particular sense of awe and reverence. It was the word he had long before vowed to avoid in his conversations, in his classes, in his life. But he knew, deep down, this was the answer; it was the answer he had been avoiding for his thirty years of teaching because he knew that what he had been teaching about evolution had only eliminated the word, but not God Himself. He knew that the idea of evolution was questionable at best but he had been teaching it anyway, hoping against hope that he would never be called on the carpet to defend it. In the end, he knew, the real answer to the great questions of life did not come from something that emerged from a slimy pit eons ago, but came from God. As though emerging from a moment of silent prayer, Professor Wilson raised his eyes to the fourth row, fifth seat where Billy Lynch remained standing, hands in his pockets.

“Is that the answer you wanted,” asked the professor with a voice, though a whisper, it could be heard by everyone.

“Thank you Professor Wilson. That is the answer but I have to wonder where you received information about God. This does not seem to have an evolutionary source. If the idea of God has also come through evolutionary processes, it would make His existence no different from any other idea we might hold. I mean, it is maybe easy to say the word GOD but saying it doesn’t make something exist, does it?”

The professor moved away from the chalkboard and stood again in front of his gray metal desk, the kind with two drawers on either side of the place where a person sits, the kind the University administration seemed to think is befitting a lecture hall. Pushing aside his briefcase and several books, the professor sat on the desk edge with his feet, encased in a pair of Brown penny loafers, dangling several inches from the floor. With his left and right hands grasping the desk edges to his sides, he seemed lost in his thoughts. ‘Where do I go next with this discussion,’ he wondered. Raising his head, he scanned across the audience and looked into the eyes of his students, these young people who had been listening to him talk about evolution. He also had a flash back to those thousands of students which had been in those same seats for the many years of his teaching, students whom he had failed because he hadn’t spoke to them about really important things but instead had told them a fairy tale about life and they had bought it, as they should have, in order that he would give them a passing grade and allow them to move on to additional studies. He, at the moment, felt he had let them down and he was beginning to sense the harm he had done to so many.

After looking into the eyes of those who were staring at him, his focus returned to Billy Lynch, this young man who remained standing, a lone figure among a sitting crowd.

“Yes,” he finally said. “Yes, God is more than a three letter word on a University chalkboard. Even if I had not written that word, God would still exist. He exists, not because I say so, but because the Bible says so. It is there we learn about such an important matter.”

Dan Schobert, W9MFG@charter.net