God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

Medium editor Brian Rosta proposed a writer’s challenge for the publication The Second Half (of our lives) ― “What I Wish I Had Known at Forty.” My answer to that is a montage of three occasions when I got great advice or insight in the first half of my life that carried me through the second half. I describe three different phases of my development, where I received illumination that has persisted through the years. All Bible quotations are NIV, copied from biblegateway.com. Number one. A dad’s important lesson Image by author using ChatGPT I was four or five years old around 1949 or 1950. My father was an airline pilot, so he was away a lot, and I guess he wanted a little father-daughter time, so he took me with him to downtown Los Altos, California. We were just outside a store, waiting to go in, but had to step back to allow an elderly man being pushed in a wheelchair to pass out first. I blurted out, “Oh, no, a wheelchair,” and scowled appropriately. The man and his aide loo...

  Image by author using ChatGPT Marian apparition stories need to be taken seriously. They have profound global influences. They always present an exquisite challenge to the Catholic Church, which it can hardly refuse. On a scale of 1 to 10 measuring unexplainable paranormal phenomena, they are usually a 10, almost equal to a ship full of little green men landing on the White House lawn. Since this is an article and not a book, I will focus on one apparition in this post, the appearance of “Mary” to a poor, unlettered, obscure Nahua Indian who was baptized by Spanish priests with the name Juan Diego. Most of the descriptive narrative below is taken from Ethel Cook Eliot’s contribution to the book listed in the sources below. The Story of Our Lady of Guadalupe On Saturday, December 9, 1531, Juan Diego left his village at daybreak to attend the celebration of Mass in another village. As he passed the hill called Tepeyac, he was startled by the unaccustomed sound of birds sing...

  Image created by the author using ChatGPT A Monday church Bible study on Matthew 26, led by our church deacon Tom Craig, inspired this post. Two issues in particular caught my attention. We discussed a meal in which a woman anointed Jesus’ feet with a costly perfume called nard, used for burials. Some claim that it was Mary of Bethany, others that it was Mary Magdalene. I wondered why the woman’s identity is still in doubt, so I launched my own investigation. Another central theme was the Passover meal and the institution of an important sacrament. The average church attender doesn’t know the significance of “new covenant.” It has an important Old Testament connection. Although four versions of the former meal leave us with questions about the woman, combining the accounts of all four gospel writers gives us a clearer picture of the Passover meal, the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples. That night, Jesus showed his followers and all of us how much that communal fello...

Image captured from facebook.com/ppnea  https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1435059125318178&set=pcb.1435059541984803 It pertained to a matter of international corruption. Early this morning, June 10, 2026, before I woke up, I had a series of chaotic dreams full of scraps that don’t mean anything. Inserted into the weirdness was a scene that felt strangely compelling. I was standing on a city sidewalk with two men, one of whom I supposedly knew. Since in reality, I was sleeping in a light robe with snaps, that was what I was wearing in the dream. But I wasn’t embarrassed about what I wore because concern about attire wasn’t in the script. The two men were talking about something in the news. I don’t recall what, but one man said to me, Janet, do you have any questions for this man? I said, Nope. Are you sure? I replied no again. The questioner was someone familiar in the dream. It kind of felt like my husband, although I’m not sure, but he was clearly hinting that the other ma...

  Image by Vecteezy First Problem In the spring of 1992, several young male students at an Assembly of God Bible college in Sacramento, California, were confused about all those women passages. If you were raised in a conservative Evangelical church, you know the ones―women should be silent in the church; women were created second and were the glory of man rather than the glory of God; first God, then Jesus, then the man, then the woman; women must submit to their husbands; women should not teach; women should pray and prophesy with their head covered as a sign of submission; women would be saved in childbirth; women should have long hair; women must not wear certain clothing, etc., etc. For two thousand years, those passages have supported male bias against women in academia, science, art, theology, and even sainthood. That constant disrespect is religion. It’s not love. The issue was never discussed in our Bible college because one of the professors was a woman, and most of...