Fact includes Faith

FACT includes Faith

If your faith is limiting you, go forward not backwards. Start operating with fact: God’s facts. 
Physics and this reality will tamper with our faith. For example, I know I am not supposed to be able to walk on water. So when I try in faith, I am already at a disadvantage.

You believe when you turn on the tap in your kitchen, water will come out. Because you know there’s water in your overhead tank. So you lather you hands, turn on the tap and put your hands under it. That’s not faith in the tap – that’s fact. You know it for a certain. (By the way, Lagos has thought me to confirm the “fact” that there’s water by turning on the tap first before grabbing the soap).

Jesus walked on water, not because he had faith. But because that is his fact. He knew he was the son of God and can do all things. He didn’t walk on water by faith, he did it by God’s fact. By God’s reality if you will.

A baby has a better chance of walking on water than an adult. Why? Because having faith implies you know the alternative and knowing the alternative tampers with our faith (i.e., we doubt). A baby does not know the “alternative” about many things. She might walk to the edge of a pool and inquisitiveness might cause her to bend down and deep a finger in it. Now her fact includes the knowledge that water is a strange thing different from the solid ground she’s standing on. Alternatively a baby might come to the same pool and just keep on walking. Because her fact at that point does not include the “knowledge” that water won’t support her weight.

There’s nothing wrong with faith. In fact, faith is good. But fact is better. Our faith can fail, but God’s fact never does. It is forever true and constant.

If Paul referred to the righteousness of God in us (Romans 3:22), which would help us be righteous, then we can refer to God’s fact (or appropriate His fact) as our believe to help us be all we can be, and not our own faith that’s subject to our senses despite our best effort.

Fact thus supersedes faith. I shall start operating in fact. Not my own fact (which barely feeds me not to talk of feeding five thousand), but in God’s fact. That remains always true.
So let us complete the circle. We are not denying the place of faith. In “fact”, we are saying God is ever faithful because His fact is ever constant. Put another way, I shall put “my faith” in God’s facts (and not in my ability to convince myself to “believe”).

And lest any man accuse me of heresy, I shall “be like bro” Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:16. (His previous pronouncements on “hair” are not law so feel free to disagree). In my case, it’s the wanderings of a sleepless mind at 3:00am.

Sleepless

Sleepless

4 thousand miles across the pond
She still haunts my dreams and my days
Shall I get a 10-tongued whip
With barbs of steel on every strand

Shred my back and front
Till I rid my soul of perdition
That has but one destination
Born of my desires and my infatuation

Woe is me I think
For the pain is not in my flesh nor in my bones
A branding iron can not distract me
Nor the food nor the wine nor the nectar that is fresh cider

I shall lie me down now
And dream of wings of fire
Of Saturn and Pluto
One a cauldron, the other – ice

2:10am. 25/01/2017

It’s only 1997

I found a CD containing some Visual Basic (VB5) codes I had written a while back (Surds and Arabic-to-Roman-Numerals) and decided to re-live what the IDE looked like then. I have never really been a programmer (People life Prof. Dayo, Shina and Adan “Java” come to mind) because if there is a word lighter than lightweight, that’s what I should use for the few codes I have written. I guess trivial is a better word as lightweight in programming has a completely different meaning

But that’s not the point of this post. It’s more to buttress the pace at which technology changes. I found Visual Basic 5 on the freedownloadmanager.org website under the Windows abandonware section and installed it on my system. During the installation, I came to the component selection screen below and was drawn to the meagre disk space requirement  (compared to the multi-GB requirements of some newer coding platforms).

Look at the screen-grab below and see if you can tell what’s odd before scrolling down:

It’s the “Space available on C:” value! It’s set to “999999 K” which is just under 1GB. I am too lazy to go check what sort of hard disk sizes were predominant in 1997 but I suspect, whoever wrote this part of the installer probably used a field with only 6 digits in it a la “640K ought to be enough for anybody.” quote by the big boss himself (Bill Gates). So I guess the logic would be something like “if we get some value back that overruns the field just set it to the max supported value which would be 999999 since it’s unlikely there will be many of those disks around. We can’t code for every negligible corner case right?”
I am not berating the programmers: I just wanted to use it to point out the rapid pace of technological development.

The laptop I installed it on had a 476GB Hard Disk Drive (HDD) with 131GB free space. Since that field in the installer was expressed in KiloBytes (KB), they would have required 9 digits instead of the 6. People code smarter now of course. “Human-friendly form” would result in the value been converted to GB or TB (etc) which reduces the field’s required number of digits.

And the VB5 IDE was just 20 years ago. Of course in computing, that’s another era/lifetime.

End Note: Bill Gates has always denied ever making the statement above. So why didn’t I remove it? Some things are part of computing lore. That quote is one of them.