Engineering, Logic and Faith                                     

By Neil Stewart

Editor’s Note:  Two and one-half years ago, Neil Stewart became a Christian.  This article is the beginning of a series which will  ultimately focus on Science and Faith.  At the editor’s request, this first part begins the chronicle of Neil’s  journey from unbelief to belief.   His story, as every person’s pilgrimage does, shows the greatness and mercy of God. 

Biography

To understand the why’s and how’s of how I came to accept the Lord, you must first grasp what I was before, and how I developed from a young child into a fully sinful young man, and how I perfected this sinful pursuit into a full blown demonstration of manhood in all it’s flawed and blemished nature.

 I was born in New London, Conn. and raised in a variety of Navy towns across the United States.  My father was a Navy Chief and served his 22 years in submarines.  He was a man’s man, all man, tough as leather and hard as nails.  He had a dedication to the Navy and to the United States that was firm and unshakeable.  His dedication to his wife and his only son was just as fierce and unfailing.  His wife was an intellectual and philosophical aristocrat and the antithesis of everything my father was.  It was quite a difference in personalities indeed.

My father schooled me in all the manly arts and things that men were supposed to do and how men were supposed to view the world and function in it.  My mother schooled me in all the intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and social skills.  Together they provided me with a view of the world that came from two entirely different points of view.

When I was eight years old my parents (as you might have predicted) came to loggerheads about most all aspects of running the family.  These conflicts were unresolvable, and they ended in divorce court when I was ten years old.  My father went his own way, and my mother continued to raise me in her own way.  She, by definition, had to work, and I became a “latch key kid,” way before it was so popular a term.

I ran the streets of San Diego as free and unencumbered as the wind, and developed a set of survival skills that would rival a street rat.  I smoked, wore leather, had a gang, rolled sailors for money, stole quarters from under the newspapers on Sunday morning, and engaged in all manner of “punkish” pursuits.  I was kicked out of each and every elementary school that San Diego had to offer, for a variety of reasons.  I never ended up in jail, but did have a series of run-ins with all of the local jurisdictional authorities.  All this, and only twelve years old!

When I was thirteen years old my father convinced [tricked] me--a streetwise punk--that it would be in my best interests to move to Seattle and live with him and his new wife, in what he called “a wholesome family environment.”  I bought his sales pitch and told my mother that I wanted to move North.  She accepted my decision and said it might do me some good.

When I got to Seattle it was Christmas break, and life was good.  I ate, slept, played, and loafed around for three weeks.  Now, this was the life that I thought was just right for me.  In January, when school started, my father and new mother introduced me to the junior high school that they said I would attend until I passed into high school, or turned 18, whichever came first.

At the end of the seventh grade year the principal of the school had my father and mother up to his office for a chat.  He announced that I had distinguished myself by earning flunking grades in each and every class that I had taken.  This was the first news they had heard, as I had cleverly destroyed all the notes home from my teachers.  The principal said that I should repeat the seventh grade, but that he would advance me if my parents wished.  It took my father all of five microseconds to firmly state that I would repeat the seventh grade until I got it right, or was 18, whichever came first.  Umm?  My game had run amok, I was held to the light, and revealed as flawed, and had to accept the punishment.

This was just the beginning of the learning curve for me.  Family values reined supreme: respect; hard work; participation in the duties of keeping the household functioning; love; truth telling; and church became part of my young rebellious life.  Wow, what a change.  My father and mother stuck to this plan with frustrating [to me] regularity and commitment.

Soon I began--oh, so slowly--to realize that it was I that was out of step with life and the world, not vice versa.  So, begrudgingly, I started to modify my behavior patterns so as to minimize the “disciplinary sessions” held with my father and the old leather strap that hung proudly in the garage where our sessions took place

I graduated from high school in 1965, number 650 out of a class of 653, and only one year behind my peers at age 19.  I looked forward to building my own life.

I joined the U.S Marines to prove to my father that, at last, I was a man.  The Marines turned out to be just what the doctor ordered, and I flourished in their culture.

In October of 1969, I resigned from the Marines and began my college education courtesy of the GI Bill.  During my formative years in the Marines I had come to conclude that I would best serve mankind as a doctor, so I pursued a pre-medical curriculum--basic hard core science and lots of it.  I embraced this curriculum as one of the “rites of passage,” and focused on becoming a part of it totally and with commitment.  I graduated from Western Washington University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry with minors in Chemistry and Mathematics.  The next year I graduated from the University of Washington with a Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology.

One of my big disappointments in life was that despite graduating summa cum laude from both universities I was not accepted to any of the 25 medical schools where I had applied.  Therefore, I redirected things toward a career in biochemistry.  I worked at the Northwest Marine Fisheries laboratory trying to find out why young salmon, swimming down a fresh water river and into the sea, do not die when they enter the highly saline ocean.  (I found out the answer, but that’s another story.)  Finding this work of biochemistry very boring, I moved on to other career choices in a random fashion, not really knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up.

One sunny, summer day I ran into an old high school chum who was recruiting for a large engineering firm, Factory Mutual Engineering.  He set me up with an interview with their representative and we hit it off immediately--mainly because I was a sailor, he was a sailor, and he needed crew on his ocean-racing sailboat.  Additionally, my transcripts convinced him that, although not a “graduate” engineer, I had all the academics to more than make up for that shortcoming.

I flourished in this company, and it became my career and one of the most fun jobs a person could have. 

It was while performing my job function for this company in May of 1997 that I met Kyle Green of Longview Fibre’s Winton Sawmill.  He was to plant the seeds of Christ that would later sprout and are now flourishing.

My natural predilections

After reading this introduction, you can readily see how I came to think the way I do, and why I was very comfortable functioning in the world of facts and figures and of not making a decision on emotionality.  I made my decisions using fact, logic and reason.  I was a linear thinker.  This means that I moved from a point “A” to point “B”, to point “C” in a stepwise fashion, and moved to “B” only when I was convinced that all the arguments and calculations to prove “A” had been met.  However, I did have embedded within my nature a basic set of values that left the door open to new ideas.  I was curious and liked to investigate new things, and had an openness and willingness to accept new concepts.  I embraced change and wanted to make or have things around me constantly improving and getting better.  I was cloaked in the “Quality Concept,” where incremental change for the better was a way of life and should be the goal of every operational organization that expected to flourish in the new economic system.

As a child and young adult I was educated in all the major philosophies and religions.  I attended church mainly because my parents thought it would be “good for me.”  My parents were “religious” but not “believers.”  They believed in good works and lived a good life, but never officially accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior, which I now understand is just the beginning of the journey.

I love to read, discuss different things with different people, and just plain learn about the world around me.  My father always said, “you can learn more by listening than talking, and all men have something to share with you; however, you should pick and choose those lessons, and take only the good.”

April 27, 1998

In May of 1996, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimers.  Shortly after this he had a massive stroke, and due to the Alzheimers and loss of memory, could not successfully rehabilitate himself.  Two months later, we put him in Anderson House, a wonderful nursing home, .  My dad needed 24-hour a day attention and could not walk or talk.  The man who had been my idol was now unable to counsel me with his sage advice, and I was feeding him soft food from a spoon.  During one of Dad’s dinners, when I was playing the game you play with little kids to get them to eat--the little train coming into the roundhouse and in the food goes to their mouth--it dawned on me!!!  What goes around comes around!!!  Life has its twists, and this was one of them.  He had fed me as a child just like this, with this same game, and now I was feeding him using the lessons he had taught me as a child.  It brings a tear to my eye just to type this.  Maybe there were other lessons that he had taught me, lurking out there, that were important, and I had not realized them yet! 

On April 24, 1998 Dad began having a series of strokes that bode ill for his future.  I gave instructions to the doctor that no heroic actions should be taken, and that only morphine should be given for any pain.  Bettie, my bride, and I left to go to our cabin on the mountain above Cashmere to come to grips with what was just about to happen.  On Monday, April 27, 1998 at 11 a.m. we returned to visit my Dad at Anderson House.  We were both shocked to see the weight he had lost in those three short days.  He was fighting like mad to stay alive.  We could see the waves of pain wash over his face and entire body as he convulsed in anguish.  He was a fighter, and this was the fight of his life.  He would not give up. 

I am convinced to this day that he would not rest until I had internalized the lesson/message that he had been trying to give me for the last three years.  I was taking life much  too  seriously,   and  I  too  would  die  if  I  did  not "lighten up” and live life at a much more relaxed pace.  He told me time and time again, while he could speak, that I was putting nails in my coffin everyday by the way I was living

Finally, at long last, I came to grips with his message.  I had called my boss in Los Angeles on Friday and asked him if I could take some time off to ponder my life and the direction that I was headed.  He had said to take all the time I needed.

At 11:05 on April 27, 1998 I whispered to my Dad that I now understood his message and that he could relax and take his final journey on this plain.  Ten minutes later my Dad died and finally let his oars rest on the waters of this life.  Crushing was this loss.  My hero had passed on, and it was clear in my mind THAT I WAS ALONE AND NEXT TO DIE!

I was now without the anchor in my life . . . no propulsion systems on my vessel . . . rudderless.  I was alone.  I was empty.  I was unfulfilled.  I was isolated from the focal point in my life.  I was dissatisfied with the direction my life was going.  I had a huge amount of pent-up anger and rage burning in my soul.  Life was getting out of hand

I was terribly successful at work, putting in 70 to 80 hours a week with a cell telephone attached to my ear, and a laptop computer attached to my fingers.  I was traveling 40% of the time around the world.  I was making huge sums of money, living the “good life” and appreciating none of it.  My obsessive-compulsive desire to succeed was driving me over the edge.  The awesome pressure of work was slowly building to a crescendo.  I was like the little gerbil in the pet store on the wheel, running hard and getting nowhere at all.  Bettie thought I was having an affair with another woman, or women, when in reality I was married to my work, to the exclusion of all else.  Ah, this was material success in full bloom.  I never had the feeling that enough material wealth was enough, I wanted more, more, more.  My marital relationship was crumbling, and my wife was seeing a series of psychologists to find out why.  I began having recurring attacks of PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] and constantly reliving my past in the jungles of Viet Nam.

My mother and my wife had been nagging me to see a doctor and I had been blowing them off, all the while working harder and harder to forget.  Finally, I consented to see my doctor for a physical.  Good news comes in batches!  Laurie Witcher gave me the physical of my life.  She checked me out as I’ve never been checked out before!  At our meeting to sum up the findings of the physical, she announced that I was killing myself slowly and with deliberation.  I had all of the cardiac risk symptoms and had to change my life once and for all, or perish if I didn’t.  I bargained with her, negotiated with her on which of the eight factors to address first, but she held firm that I needed to address all eight right then or face the consequences.  So much for arguing with a woman doctor!

So right then (thinking of Dad’s message) I retired, called enough “enough,” and began my pilgrimage up the mountain.

Stay Tuned!  Neil’s story will be continued in our next issue.