I'm Done with Being Politically Correct.

A few weeks ago in my American Government class we had to sign up for a topic to debate on, work with a group to get a debate together, and then battle it out in class with our opposers. I glanced at the list looking for a topic close to the top so that I could more or less "get it over with", so I wrote my name down beside "against abortion", knowing I didn't support abortion and not knowing much more than that.

When I began to research, I remember actually feeling physically sick.

If we want to look at it in a political angle, we always hear people saying that abortion needs to be legalized for the rape victims. When I began to research, I expected to see a large portion of the women who got abortions report that they received one because they were a victim of rape. That, however, is not what I found.

I discovered that less than 1% of women who receive an abortion in the US report that they got one because they were a victim of rape.

But this is what all the political gurus first go to when they try to defend abortion, I thought as I scratched my head. So why do women get an abortion? What I discovered shook me to my core. Most report receiving an abortion for 3 top reasons: They got pregnant at an inconvenient time in their life and just didn't want a baby right then, their significant other left them when they found out they were pregnant, or they had money issues. Thats right, most women are getting their abortions simply because "its not the right time". Are you kidding me?

I then began to get information as to how an abortion is done and exactly what is going on with the fetus at certain weeks and I will spare you all of those details, but I can assure you that my eyes welled as I read these things on my computer screen as I was completing my work study hours. There was and is no doubt in my mind that abortion is absolute murder.

.....
Last week as I was walking to my 9am, I saw large posters with the words "Warning: Photos of Mass Genocide Ahead". I thought someone must be doing a Holocaust awareness thing or something and went on to my class, thinking nothing else about it. I then heard a buzz of people absolutely livid. Apparently some pro-life activists had set up a large booth to both raise awareness about abortion and protest it. Pictures of aborted babies were posted everywhere. People were mad. 

I heard one major complaint: "I shouldn't have to see dead babies as I'm walking to class!" or  "I'm pro-life and everything but those pictures were just gross". And of course the really great, solid argument of "Pro-life people are dumb and shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion". That's my favorite. I even read a poster of someone protesting which read "Trust women: Pro-choice is pro-life"....what? Isn't that kind of like Hitler saying "Trust me on this one guys, the Jews gotta go, I know what I'm doing". Is that the best they could come up with, seriously?

......
So, as I stated in my very long blog post from 3 this morning, I thought about doing a blogpost for all of the major issues David Platt addressed in Secret Church last night. In all honesty I'm not sure if that will actually happen, but I do have to speak about abortion. I am tired of this staying in the darkness because no one wants to talk about it, and I feel compelled.

The main argument for abortion is that within the first trimester the baby is not actually a person, but just a clump of cells. If we want to talk science, I can talk science. For my debate specifically I read the definition of life first. Webster defines life as "the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity to grow, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death". Interesting, because for all but that whole reproduction part (at this stage), that clump of cells has life. If you want to argue for the reproduction part then full term babies or toddlers are free game too. From the moment that a person is conceived, it continuously is growing. Ask any woman who has had a baby before and see if they believe that a baby is a person within that first trimester.

But putting human's limited outlook on science aside, let's look at scripture. The all famous Psalm 139 tells us a lot, including that God knitted us in our mothers womb, that he saw us and knew the number of days we had, that we were wonderfully made even then. There are a number of verses that tell us God is the giver and taker of life. There is no doubt that biblically there is a person in there because God is the one who blesses us with children. He put that child there, he made that child possible, he is knitting that baby. We then can look at verses such as Job 10:8-13 and see that God made EVERYONE wonderful, even the disabled, and we as humans have no right to tell a disabled child that they were a mistake and they don't even deserve life. David Platt told us that about 90% of women who are told their baby will have a disability choose to abort. We as Americans see no worth in the life of a disabled person and there is something seriously wrong with that.

Gregory Koukl talked about a little girl named Rachel. "If a doctor came into the hospital room and, instead of caring for Rachel, took the life of this little girl.... it would be a homocide. However, if this same little girl- the very same Rachel- was inches away resting inside her mother's womb, she could be legally killed by abortion".

David Platt did address the subject of rape babies. Guess what? They deserve life too. Duetronomy 24:16 says "Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers,". He told us that a woman would not be allowed to in turn murder her rapist for emotional relief, so why do we let her murder the innocent product of a bad deed? I know that it would be so incredibly hard to have that baby, I do. Do not think that I am downplaying that for one second, because that would cause me to wake up every day and pray for grace for that child, but it has to be done. Extend the same mercy to that innocent child as God extends to you every single day.

Another huge argument that advocates abortion is that making it illegal forces women to get it done with other means, including horrifying stories involving coat hangers. That sounds like a moral issue, not an abortion issue. The problem there is not that we should make it safer for them to murder a child, the problem is that we have got to change a culture. David Platt compared this to someone robbing a bank. Just because it is dangerous for someone to rob a bank does that mean we have an obligation to make it safer for them? Of course not! No one would for a second support that idea. Yet we do it in this society every day. It is time for women to take responsibility for their actions.

The main beef I have is not with the culture, honestly. It's the fact that our churches are sitting back in silence on this issue in fear of "offending someone". Churches geared towards my generation especially live in fear that if they speak out against one hot topic issue then the whole congregation will call them the go-to names (like closed-minded, hypocrites, hateful, you know the names) so they simply do not talk about it while their congregation sits there in sin. I find it interesting that the church has no problem speaking out against "normal" sins, for lack of a better term. A preacher will more than gladly talk about a man's sin of lusting or a woman's obligation to be modest while avoiding an issue that most of the congregation either participates in or thinks is okay. It's time to change our church culture, people. We can not afford to remain silent on issues such as these any longer. An abortion occurs every second of every minute of every hour of every day. We kill more people than the holocaust killed every year. Do you understand how many souls that is? Who are we to say if God's work is good enough to live or not?

If you have had an abortion, know that there is mercy and grace for you. You are fully forgiven. If you have supported abortion in the past, I strongly urge you to get on the biblical side of it. And if you are reading this, I urge you to speak out. This has to be addressed in our churches and in our government.

Here's My Heart, Lord, Speak What is True

   Put your hand on your chest. You feel that constant thudding?  Social media often prompts you to do this so that you can feel your "purpose" beating inside of you, which is a little too abstract for me, but really, how cool is that? You're not even thinking about it and your heart is pumping about 2000 gallons of blood a day. 2000 gallons. When I start to think about what incredible things the organs are doing like that I begin to get really nervous because I know how intricate they are and how much heavy duty stuff they're doing. Luckily, however, I need not worry about such things because the maker of my heart is also the keeper of it. Unlike my car engine, when my heart stops working the manufacture of it collects the model and tweaks it until it runs forever. Cool, right?

   Today I went to a Tuesday night sermon/worship deal that I go to pretty regularly and we were worshipping to "Here's my heart" by Passion. The worship leader made some comment about how he heard no one knows what makes our heart start beating in the medical field and that's cool because we as Christians know what makes our hearts start beating. Well, he's partially correct. The medical field actually does know what makes our heart start beating, however they only know it in medical terms as "electricity". We know that this "electricity" very well may exist (yet I keep putting it in quotation marks for some reason...) but that it doesn't just happen on it's own. The maker of the stars and of life and of babies jump starts your heart and breathes life into your lungs and counts the hairs on your head before you're even depending on yourself to stay alive. I try to imagine what that must be like. The same God that created the Swiss Alps and Saturn and a sunflower wove my skin together, touched my heart (literally), blew up my lungs, and kissed the 643rd hair on my head. Let it sink in because that is CRAZY. You have literally been touched by God himself.

  I find it interesting that I know this but I don't think of it every day.  The only time I focus on my breathing is during my daily yoga (deep, cleansing breaths fellow yogis), but how precious is that breath? The only time I think about my heart beating is when I have one of those migraines where your heart is beating into your head, but how huge is each beat? I cry out to God again and again in school, asking for help and for success and for sanity, and again and again he grants just that to me, but every single semester I just do the same thing over again. When will I learn? When will I take what we might consider the most basic of bodily functions as precious as they are? When will I trust the one who made that heart or that breath in all areas of my life, always, without any doubts?

   I think I find it most interesting that we're the only creatures who live like this. One of the lines in my prayer journal from July 13th states:
     "As I sit in bed by my bedroom window, I hear thousands of crickets singing your praise in their own language. As soon as night falls they sing your praise until dawn and I think I could learn a lot from such a creature. You are higher, God."
The sun rises every day, warming the earth and reminding us of the great romance that is in Christ Jesus. The wind blows and unravels that same love story. The crickets chirp all night by my window, crying out to God. When will I learn that I should do the same? My heart is beating. My lungs are filling. God hasn't let me down yet, even when I thought he did. When will I wake up in the morning and sing praises until I fall back asleep?

So to God I say I'm sorry. I'm sorry I don't take as breath as preciously as I should. I'm sorry I doubt you again and again, even though I know that where I am is where you want me to be. You have gotten me through the very tip-top highs and the super down-hill lows. You have never once left my side. You have always provided for me, always been faithful, always been knitting me together as if I were still in your palm. And I can say right now in this moment, though I'm sure my human nature will cause me to doubt this in the future, You will always be by my side, always be providing, always be knitting. Even when it seems like you're not, I know that you are. Always.

"You are strong, you are sure,

You are life, you endure,

You are good, always true,

You are light breaking through,

You are more than enough,

You are here, you are love,

You are hope, you are grace,

You're all I have, You're everything,

Here's my heart Lord,

Here's my heart Lord,

Here's my heart Lord,

Speak what is true."

So You Think Cheerleading Isn't a Sport?

"Way back in high school" (like it was a long time ago), I was  a cheerleader and was constantly being annoyed by how many "cheerleading isn't a real sport" comments were made to me. After only a 6 minute routine was done at a competition and I left the floor panting, almost dry-heaving, that thought just flew all over me. I would think "If this isn't a sport than I don't ever want to play one because I don't think I would live through that". Well, in my Physics class we had a project where we had to explain the physics involved in one sport. I of course chose cheerleading. My paper is listed below. I encourage you to read it not just because it will rid any doubt that cheerleading is a sport  from your mind, but also because I just find it really interesting.  Grab a snack before you start reading folks, it's LONG.

When you think of cheerleading, your mind probably wanders to a mental image back from the 1950s, complete with extremely long skirts and oversized pom-poms with girls yelling some form of  “rah, rah, rah!” into a megaphone. Cheerleaders are always being depicted in movies as the character with the least amount of intelligence. In high school I was a cheerleader myself and constantly was trying to overcome the stereotypes people pegged on me, even while I was taking AP courses and had one of the highest GPAs in my high school. The truth is, cheerleading lately has been evolving into what a lot of people would consider an extreme sport that requires quite a bit of brainpower.

         In modern times, your dancing skills and peppiness alone will not earn you a spot on your high school cheerleading squad. Try outs for a team now last over a week, putting girls through intense pre-conditioning, dance routines, and tumbling passes. You must be able to flip upside down in synch with twenty other girls, jump up and hit your toes at the perfect timing in the middle of a routine, and soar higher than ever in a stunt group as your teammates thrust you into the air.  Most cheerleaders don’t realize that in almost everything that they are doing, they are subconsciously applying basic principles of physics to make sure everything goes off without a hitch. Here we will be looking at the physics in three main components of cheerleading: jumps, tumbling, and stunting.

         Jumps aren’t something most people would consider when thinking of the physics involved in cheerleading simply because it’s something that we do as children. It’s not complicated, but it does involve quite a bit of physics. Kendra Harvey, an author for a Livestrong article on this very subject, explains jumps by saying, “You are simply working with your own force against gravity to accelerate your body off the ground,” (2). Notice two words that Mrs. Harvey says: force and acceleration. Using our knowledge in physics, we can remember that Newton’s 2nd law actually relates force and acceleration with another variable, mass (10). A girl’s jump height is directly related to the amount of force that she puts into the jump. According to Newton’s second law, if a cheerleader wants to improve her jumps, she must improve her acceleration, her muscle mass, or both (2).

 Another way that we see cheerleaders improve on their jump height is the way that they swing their arms before they jump. Take a toe-touch for example. A girl starts with her arms raised in a V shape and her hands in fists. She then swings both of her arms in large circles down while simultaneously bending her knees as she prepares to jump. As she jumps, her arms come to rest in almost a T-shape as her fists reach to meet her toes, and that all happens in about 4 seconds. The reasoning behind swinging your arms before a big jump is to build up momentum so that you can increase the height of your jump and help your form (11). In all honesty, a cheerleader probably isn’t thinking of the reasoning behind why she swings her arms before a jump because it just feels natural to her. As a cheerleader myself, I never considered really why this was done until I began to do research for this paper. Despite whether she realizes why it is done, she is implementing several different principles of physics into every jump.

The second thing we are looking into is tumbling. Tumbling refers to all the “tricks” a cheerleader does on her own, starting from something as simple as a cartwheel and increasing in difficultly all the way to several back handsprings in a row complete with a back flip, also known in cheerleading as a back tuck series. The physics involved in tumbling is much more complicated than that of which is involved in a simple jump and a cheerleader must be completely aware of how those physics go into each move or she runs the risk of hurting herself in a serious way.  The surface that a girl is tumbling on is very important for several reasons, two of which are friction and what could be described as push-back. A Princeton cheerleader explains that “…a tumbler needs a floor that generates enough friction on her feet to keep her bouncing/moving through the pass,” (9).  A surface with too much friction plants your feet hard at the end of a pass and sends a painful and possibly damaging shock through your joints. A surface with too little friction doesn’t allow you to stop your tumble pass as easily and you could slip and fall at the end. Similarly, a surface that gives very little push-back on the tumbler, such as the earth, requires more force to successfully complete a tumble pass. A surface that gives more push-back, like a spring floor or a gym floor, requires less force to complete the pass (9). Cheerleaders must take all of this into account before they even think about actually tumbling.

Now, let’s consider when a girl is actually doing her tumbling. One of the simplest but more intriguing moves is called a back handspring. A cheerleader can either do what is a called a standing back handspring where she tumbles from standing in one spot, or a running back handspring where she uses momentum built up in a run to help her carry through with the pass. The former is mostly used when a girl has multiple tricks she is doing, such as several back handsprings followed by a back tuck, and she needs a lot more momentum to keep her tumble pass powerful so that she can overcome the force of gravity through several moves (2). With a back handspring, the two main components of physics that a cheerleader is working with are gravity and Newton’s 3^rd law, which states that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” (10). Earlier we talked about the momentum needed so that a girl can have lots of force in her tumbling. Three girls involved in a project similar to mine explain why that force is needed in saying that “the force carries the tumbler backwards and gravity pushes her back towards the Earth.” (5). With every flip she does, a cheerleader is constantly trying to overcome the force of gravity or at least use it to her advantage. Newton’s 3^rd Law implies that with every force she is enacting on the ground (i.e. her hands pushing off the ground with force), the ground is enacting an equal but opposite force right back on her (5). This allows for those nice high back handsprings that woo crowds at half time.

The last aspect of cheer that we will be looking at is quite possibly the most complicated- stunting. Stunting can be described as the cool tricks a cheerleader does in the air with the help of other cheerleaders, and it can appear in many forms. A group of cheerleaders (called bases) hold the girl at the top of the build (called a flyer) while she is constantly balancing her weight and cheering at the same time. The bases then usually throw the flyer in the air while she does a trick as she dismounts and the bases catch her. This can be done with as few as one base or as many as four or five bases. The flyer constantly has to balance her center of gravity and that varies “based on how many people are holding her and what kind of stunt she is performing.” (1). If a stunt group is performing a simple “prep”, the flyer stands with her feet shoulder width apart and the bases hold her feet at chest level. Here, her center of gravity is almost the same as it would be on level ground. If a stunt group is attempting a more complicated one-legged stunt, say a liberty, a flyer must stand on one leg with the other legged bent while the bases work together to hold her one foot up over their heads in what is called an extension. Here, her center of gravity is much different and she must work to counterbalance the change by popping the hip that is attached to her bent leg up, which a result of Newton’s 3^rd Law (10).

The dismount requires many principles of physics as well. To dismount from a prep, the bases bend their legs slightly and rapidly extend their arms up with as much force as they can muster. This bend acts much like the arm swing in jumps acted and helps the stunt gain momentum and the bases increase their force so that it can reach maximum height. In cheerleading, we tell the flyer that she must “ride it out”, meaning she should stay in the same position as she was when the bases held her until she reaches a maximum height where her velocity is equal to zero. If she doesn’t do this, her stunt doesn’t go as high because she interrupted her velocity before it was able to reach zero (1). For a more complicated stunt that could involve a flip or a spin, the flyer must reach that maximum height so that she has enough time coming down to perform the stunt. If she fails to do this, she could land face down in the bases arms or move slightly to one direction where the bases cant catch her at all. In a simpler dismount, called a cradle, a flyer rides it out until her velocity is equal to zero and then hits a slight pike, or slightly pushes her tailbone back. This pushes her center of gravity back so that she can transition safely from being vertical to horizontal and her bases can catch her. From here, the bases must “catch high” meaning that they start to catch the flyer at about chest level as opposed to near their stomachs. The Princeton cheerleader explains why this is done by saying “By catching high, the bases and back spot can start their opposed force of catching sooner,” which is another way cheerleaders are utilizing Newton’s 3^rd Law (9). I just chose a few aspects of physics of basic stunting to include in this paper, however there are much more that go beyond the realms of this assignment.

As you can now see, cheerleading requires much more mathematics and science than most people realize, even arguably more than any other sport. Those who argue cheerleading is not a sport have probably not considered all the thought that goes into every jump, tumble pass, or stunt and therefore do not understand the complexity that the sport has evolved into.  Beyond that, cheerleading has helped many actually grasp certain concepts of physics. As I was researching articles, I saw many comments from students saying that explaining cheerleading as I have helped them to understand Newton’s Laws better. There is no doubt that cheerleading involves a complex balance of physics and pep to pull off a routine flawlessly.