Now that I am a father, I have learned the wonders of teaching children not to go in the street. A lesson I am sure many people remember from their youth. “Do not dash into the street,” my parents would say, “Look both ways.” Good advice, I now know. Why? Why is it a bad idea to rush out into the street. Well, taken from a 2 year old perspective, all you want to do is to get that ball that rolled into the street. No harm in that right? Except for the big truck speeding down the street…

God tries to teach us in the same way, although sometimes the truck is something we will never understand. I am reminded of the truck often when reading the old testament about the law. There are certain things God forbid because they are just a really bad idea, like eating pork when no one had heard of refridgeration or a thermometer, or having sex outside of marraige. Then there are a lot of other things that we may never understand like a two year old and a truck. You do not have to explain to a child how electricity works, you just teach them not to put paperclips in the outlets.

Just do what He says, and you wont get hit. He is, in love, trying to protect you.

My father commented on the Inertia post, “I believe there is a ‘worldly wind’ that is a headwind if you are moving in the right direction, and a tailwind if you are not.” I agree with the idea, but it reminded me of a more complete model I came up with a while ago.

One of the aims of physics is to come up with a unified field theory, which, in short, is “an attempt to unify all the fundamental forces and the interactions between elementary particles into a single theoretical framework.” I postulated that there was a unified framework for motivation. So that a person’s inertia was only motivated by one kind of fundamental force. That force is love. The bible tells us that God is love (1 John 4:16), and therefore He is the root of all motivation.

Unfortunately the word “love” is a bit overloaded in English, but perhaps that works out well in this model because love can be manifest in many forms. Pride, greed and the like are all forms of love, twisted and broken, but forms of love of the self. There are also many different forms of love between any two people; spouses, brothers, coworkers etc.

Taking this idea and applying it to the inertia idea means that all forces acting upon us are love. I believe that by extension, the power of those forces are directly proportional to your distance from them. The closer you are to the world, the stronger it’s influence, the closer to God, the stronger His influence.

I haven’t spent a lot of time developing this idea, because I’m not too sure of the value of a “physical” model for a spiritual idea. Having said that, I think there are some interesting things that it could show.

If we are all in this love universe (what a loaded phrase, please, no ’60s reference was meant), our position affects everyone around us as they are also acting upon us. Some are pulling, some are pushing. Each having a butterfly effect on all the others.

So, back to the “worldly wind” idea. I think that feeling of a headwind/tailwind is really a critique on our position in the universe. We feel much stronger forces in the wrong direction. What is the escape velocity of the “world”, and just how much mass do I have?