Lasagna Love

The strongest material in the universe, the power of pasta engineering, and how to fold steel.

This year, we are learning to love better by exploring the greatest commandment – Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  We’ve looked at the parts of our lives that are typically associated with love – our heart, soul, and mind, but now we need to finish the journey by investigating how to love with all our strength.  Weak love isn’t much love at all.  Real love is made of sterner stuff, and if we are going to love better, we need to learn how to love with ALL our strength.  Today, is the first in a ten-part series on how to have strong love, and today, we are going to look at where strength comes from – and it looks a lot like lasagna.

"Remember, you are loved, so go, love better!"

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Transcript

Neutron stars are amongst some of the most studied objects in astronomy.  In the vastness of space, neutron stars have unique properties that make them standout like beacons in the darkness to the trained sensors of NASA’s Hubble and James Webb telescope programs.

Neutron stars are theorized to be what is leftover after a star goes supernova.  Supernovas have also been widely observed by astronomers as far back as the second century.  In 185 AD, astronomers from Imperial China recorded a bright star in the sky that slowly faded away over the course of eight months.  The Chinese used to refer to these rare appearances of supernovas as “guest stars” because they temporarily were added to the night sky only to disappear over time… yet unlike comets, they didn’t move.

Modern astronomers now believe that neutron stars are what is leftover after that supernova event.  With the possible exception of black holes, neutron stars are the smallest and densest known class of stellar objects.  Imagine taking the mass of a colossal star and compressing its core into something the width of a city.  Neutron stars are dead stars.  They no longer generate heat, and as their name implies, are composed almost entirely of neutrons.  You may remember from high school chemistry that neutrons are one of three subatomic elements – protons (which care a positive charge), electrons (which carry a negative charge), and neutrons.  Neutrons carry no charge, all they have is mass.  And that’s what a neutron star is – a collapsed core of a star that has compressed under its own mass.  Think of neutron stars as space pressure cookers.  Immense amounts of pressure that cooks up the strongest material in the universe.  Today, we are going to talk about the strength of the cosmos  - nuclear pasta.

I’m Scott Beyer and this is the Love Better podcast where we explore the truths and lies about love and more importantly how to turn love into a skill – something we can get better at and hone along the way. 

This year, we are learning to love better by exploring the greatest commandment – Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  We’ve looked at the parts of our lives that are typically associated with love – our heart, soul, and mind, but now we need to finish the journey by investigating how to love with all our strength.  Weak love isn’t much love at all.  Real love is made of sterner stuff, and if we are going to love better, we need to learn how to love with ALL our strength.  Today, is the first in a ten-part series on how to have strong love, and today, we are going to look at where strength comes from – and it looks a lot like lasagna.

Deep inside a neutron star, the pressure is so intense that it forces the matter into unusual shapes. As neutrons and protons are squeezed together, they form patterns that scientists think look a bit like pasta! These include:

·       "Spaghetti" shapes: long, thin tubes of nuclear matter

·       "Lasagna" shapes: flat, layered sheets of matter

·       "Gnocchi" shapes: smooshed round globs, like little balls of matter

Scientists call these structures nuclear pasta because of how they resemble different pasta shapes.

The forces inside neutron stars are mind-boggling. The bonds between the particles in nuclear pasta are incredibly strong, making it possibly the hardest material in the universe—up to ten billion times stronger than steel! This is because the neutrons are packed so tightly that it takes enormous energy to break the structure.

Now, it is worth noting that nuclear pasta has never been directly observed due to the extreme conditions of a neutron star, but due to what we do know about neutron stars, nuclear physics, and what we can observe, the lasagna like layers of neutronic strength are a fairly widely accepted idea.  Physicists have run computer simulations that mimic the conditions inside neutron stars. These simulations often result in nuclear matter forming lasagna-like shapes, just as the theory predicts. These shapes allow the neutrons and protons to stay close together under extreme pressure, which supports the idea that nuclear pasta is the most stable structure there.

Which is exactly what strong love is meant to be, right?  Strong things are stable things.  Strength isn’t fickle or capricious.  Strength is rooted and grounded… and guess what, that’s exactly what Paul prayed that the early Christians would be.  The following is from Ephesians 3, starting in verse 17:

“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith--that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” (Eph 3:17-21)

Strong love has depth to it, roots sunk deeply into the earth.  It doesn’t blow away in the hurricanes of life and it doesn’t react to every irritation or fickle whim either.  The strongest thing in the universe is defined that way because it is so dense, so unequivocally stable, that they aren’t going anywhere.  But, here is the uncomfortable part, guess how you make nuclear pasta?  It’s all about the pressure cooker.

Nuclear pasta is literally squeezed by gravity until all the instability is removed.  The lasagna layers of strength come from the squish that rearranges the neutrons into the most fixed and balanced positions possible.  Their firmness comes from the pressure… and unfortunately, my dear friends, that is exactly how we get strong love, too.

James, the brother of Jesus, in his writings addresses the most practical aspects of being a disciple of Christ, and here is how he starts his letter:

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. (Jas 1:2-3 ESV)

James had seen Jesus’ strong life and what produced His strength? Trials and endurance through those trials.

James had also seen the growth of the early church.  People from all walks of life, many of whom had lived less than ideal lives.  Lives full of drunken decisions, sexual promiscuity, and selfish greed and prideful malice.  The church grew from a rather motley crew into a powerful force that turned the world on its head.  How?  Christianity wasn’t formed in the comforts of America where we have freedom of religion and freedom of speech.  Christ’s church began in an era of persecution, martyrdom, and public shaming for their faith in Jesus.  Those ragtag followers of Jesus grew into the Christian community that overcame the world through trials.  Christianity didn’t begin with the red carpet being laid out for disciples – they ran the gauntlet and were better people for it.  Turns out, if you can endure the pressure, you can turn the darkest of coal into diamonds.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. (Jas 1:2-3 ESV)

James’ ethos is echoed in other places, too.  Peter would say in his first letter to the church, “In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith--more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire--may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” (1Pe 1:6-7 ESV)

Peter (who himself had experienced many trials and hard days in his pursuit of living for Jesus) realized that there is a connection between difficult times and strong people.  He compared it to the metallurgical process of removing impurities from gold.  Gold doesn’t start out pure, you have to remove the imperfections through a process called smelting.  Gold refining isn’t a pretty process if you are the gold.  It starts by crushing and grinding the raw ore so that you can liberate the valuable gold particles and then heating that crushed ore at extremely high temperatures in a furnace.  Whatever endures that process is gold, what burns out wasn’t meant to be there in the first place.

And as we talk about learning to love with all our strength, this is an important point to remember – if we want strong love, we need to be prepared to give up our own weaknesses.

This is why God disciplines us for our bad behavior and doesn’t always show immediate mercy when we sin.  As Hebrews chapter 12 says, “And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? "My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives." It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?” (Heb 12:5-7)

Discipline is a process employed by every loving parent.  Without discipline, children don’t associate the consequences of bad choices with the bad choices, and therefore, don’t gain the skills of self-control and character maturation.

Hebrews 12 also refers to growth as “your struggle against sin” – becoming strong is meant to be a struggle and it requires wrestling with yourself, grappling with your own weaknesses, and learning to reorganize your life and desires into a stronger, more stable, orientation.

Like the pressure cooker of neutron stars and the gold smelter’s furnace – hardship has a way of driving out the impurities of our character.

But not all hardships are self-inflicted by our own poor decisions.  Sometimes good people suffer through no fault of their own – even to the point of enduring trials because they are making the right choices.  Peter addresses this type of trial in his first letter to the church, too, when he says:

For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. (1Pe 2:19-21 ESV)

Paul echoes this sentiment of suffering for doing the right thing when he tells his protégé, Timothy:

“Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.” (2 Tim 2:3)

In both of these instances, Peter and Paul point to the idea that not all trials are suffering caused by poor choices.  There are times, where persecution, testing, and hardship happen BECAUSE of righteous behavior.

Jesus warned His disciples about this when He spoke to them in the days leading up to His crucifixion when He said:

"If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. (Jhn 15:18-20 ESV)

There is a common theme that can be seen amongst Peter, Paul, and Jesus’ sayings on the subject of suffering for righteous living… and it is that when you suffer for doing what is right, your life becomes fused closer and closer to Jesus and to the rest of His disciples.

There is a process of strengthening steel called folding.  You may have heard of Damascus steel before – it is both beautiful and significantly stronger than standard steel.  A master metalsmith works the steel by flattening it, heating it, folding it over itself, and then heating it again until the steel becomes layered together at the molecular level in such a way it looks a lot like layers of lasagna – from the nuclear pasta of neutron stars all the way to the lasagna layers of Damascus steel used in knives and swords… layering material together makes it significantly stronger.

When we suffer with someone – we bond with them.  Like two layers fusing together.  Want to love God more – suffer with Jesus.  Suffer for Jesus’ cause and you will learn to love Him more, love other Christians more, and love the thing Jesus loves more.  Remember, more than anything else in this whole world, Jesus loves people – He died for them… and when we live as disciples of Christ, we learn to love what our King loves, too.

Suffering fuses us together with the lasagna layers of God and His kingdom.  And as Solomon said, “And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him--a threefold cord is not quickly broken. (Ecc 4:12)

Learn to love better.  Learn to face the pressure and the pain and become stronger for it.

As always, thank you for listening and hopefully we've done something to help make your life a little bit better.  If you have a chance to rate, review or share the podcast it would be a blessing.  By sharing with others or leaving a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, you help us reach more people. 

Or maybe you have a fun or obscure history account, a feel-good news story, or a riveting scientific fact you think could help us love better.  If so, I’d love to hear it!  Feel free to email me at scott@biblegrad.com 

And if you are ever in the Louisville, KY area, I’d like to invite you to worship with us at the Eastland congregation.  We meet for worship every Sunday and have Bible classes for all ages Wednesday’s, too.  If you want more information about Eastland, visit us at eastlandchristians.org.  Or if you are looking for more tools to enrich your Bible study, visit my personal Bible site, Biblegrad.com, where you can read daily Bible devotionals called Biblebites, take online Bible classes, or find videos that will help you study through the Bible throughout the year.

And until next time, “Remember, you are loved, so go… love better.”