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Talking Donkey International

Country Wisdom Season 3

Jim Ayer

Janice Nelson

Evolution The Evidence

Welcome everyone, we're excited to share some country wisdom with you.

King Solomon had a thing or 2 to say about the path to wisdom.

In Proverbs 4 he wrote, Let your eyes look directly forward and your gaze be straight before you.

Keep straight the path of your feet and all your ways will be sure.

All of that granite slowly, over time, falling off of that top of that mountain, millions of years.

And after 69 million years, voila, this is what we have.

But wait a second, does that really make sense?

But that's what many scientists would have us believe.

You just add more time and more time to anything, and it can happen.

And he found isotope halos of polonium, 218 in particular halo, had half-life of 3 minutes.

There he found that the granite cooled so rapidly it captured those halos.

Well, it means that the scientist can't be right with millions and millions and millions of years, but God can when he spoke everything into existence.

I have heard you tell some pretty wild stories, but that is just absurd.

You have to use the absurd to try and get people to stop and think, you know, could it could it really happen?

You know, could there's a Boeing 747 just come together?

You know, there's completely well, not completely a different topic, but I can remember at different points in my life, like even back in high school biology, realizing there are some major holes in this whole Darwinian theory.

And 1 of them that I to this day have never heard a decent explanation of is how, with the gradual little steps, would you ever end up with male and female?

Because unless you have a conscious nature that you just don't want to call God, you would have to know as you're, you know, over millions of years developing a female, somebody has to be aware that there's a male over here, otherwise What's the point?

You know, the 2 really have to be fully formed, complete before they're going to do each other any good.

So that just never made sense to me that, oh, they just, you know, developed.

And if, according to evolution, really our whole purpose in life, if there is a purpose to a randomly produced life, it would be just to get our genes passed on, right?

Well, wouldn't it have been much more efficient if we were all just hermaphrodites?

You know, I remember having my first little aquarium when I was a kid, and my dad said, well, we need to buy a snail to put in the aquarium to help keep it clean.

And 1 day there was a little snail in there.

So my dad explained to me that, you know, I don't know if all snails are hermaphrodites, but this 1 was, and it's like, oh yeah, you only need 1 and it'll produce by itself.

Isn't that what evolution should have done?

If your whole purpose is reproduce, then why should you be dependent on someone else?

Because according to evolution, it always, everything is always getting better and better and better, producing some higher form.

I don't know if you've read this book, but I remember another big turning point for me, Michael Bay's book, Darwin's Black Box.

In that, there were sections I had to read 2 or 3 times because it was meant more for scientists.

And he wasn't even coming at it from a perspective of being a Christian.

It was, he's a scientist, what kind, microbiologist, something like that.

And he said, okay, Darwin, back in his day, it was easy enough to look under a microscope and see these cells look like just little blobs.

It was easy enough to go, well, that's just a simple cell.

It could have arisen from primordial stew.

But we know now cells are anything but simple.

The whole, He talks about all the systems within a cell, including an entire waste removal system, without which the cell would die.

Now that we've mapped the human genome, you know, Darwin would just...

It just keeps getting more and more complicated the deeper you look.

And he said, this could not have happened on a gradual step-by-step basis because you need that whole system for the cell to function.

And if you were taking millions of years, tiny little steps, how would nature know to select for something like that until it was complete?

It's so interesting because everywhere we turn, there's evidence for creation as opposed to evolution.

That's what I meant when I said God doesn't just ask us to go on blind faith.

I know the phrase, you know, God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

If there's something you don't understand, rather than saying, God must be wrong here, because this is not making sense to me.

I have learned that it makes a lot more sense spiritually to go, okay, I don't understand it, but there's gotta be a reason, or God wouldn't have done it this way.

So you might need to get to that point at some point, but there is so much evidence.

He's not asking us to believe that He created everything on blind faith.

And I had the privilege 1 time of having Dr.

I can remember in there talking about the human eye, the complexity of the human eye.

But an exciting thing he was doing at that time was studying Mount St.

Oh, it's incredible to stand there and years later to look at the damage that that caused.

And he was going year after year and studying.

He noticed in Spirit Lake that used to be this gorgeous lake.

All of a sudden, here was all this logs had washed in the lake and pretty soon they're waterlogging because they had their entire root mass still intact with this with the tree with just no limbs.

They would upright themselves and pretty soon they begin sinking.

He decided to dive 1 year, went in there and here's all these successional layers of forest laid down over millions of years.

And then he came back 1 year, and all of a sudden, this earthen dam kind of mud had broken out, and here is a mini Grand Canyon.

A brand new canyon with all the strata, all the layers, all the levels.

And you think, ah, you know, Grand Canyon, could it have happened in just a short time?

Helens, scientists would not have said that could happen in 1 day.

And it's interesting, too, because it got permission to do core samples of some of today's petrified forests that they say were laid down over a millennia of time.

Hope In Present Danger, Part 1

I'm holding up a book, Hope in Present Danger.

I went through it and well, Janice, I had tears multiple times.

Matter of fact, I can probably guarantee it.

Almost crack up now just thinking about what's in this book.

But I've got Adriana Pazos here with us today and her family.

Adriana, would you introduce your family?

This is my dad, Cornelio, and my mom, Michaela, and we're just blessed to be here together and share our story.

This story is about getting out of communism.

I mean, in a country that was steeped in control and everything you can imagine, they felt led by God to get out.

And this is their story now of how miraculously and incredibly the whole family finally got out.

And the family, you were how old when the family kind of, you started realizing there's some problem in the way life existence goes on in Romania.

Sure, so I was fortunate enough and blessed enough to actually grow up in a Seventh-day Adventist family and a Christian family who love God.

So I grew up with the stories of the Bible.

My grandmother just sharing with me the beautiful stories of the Bible.

And I remember my favorite 1 was the story of Joseph.

And so it was, I really didn't realize, I think, you know, the danger and the difficulty that we were living in until really by the time I actually got to school.

So in the first grade I remember going to school and the church the school in Romania was actually from Monday through Saturday.

And interestingly enough, my mom and dad, neither my grandmother, actually told me not to do otherwise.

And so I remember going to school on Sabbath and you know clearly my parents and my grandparents would go to church.

And I would come back and so that was first grade, second grade, third grade.

And then at that point it began dawning on me there's a difference here because all along, before that, we would all go to church on Sabbath.

And so that became marked in my brain as to there is a difference here.

And I remember coming to mom and saying, mom, I don't want to go to school on Saturday.

And I thought, was it because I just really didn't want to go to school?

But I remember mom telling me, why is it that you don't want to go to school on Sabbath?

And at 9 years old, it was about that time, I think it was, mom, at about 9 years old, mom said, you need to know why it is that you do not want to go to school on Saturday, because it has to be your choice and your decision because if you make that choice, that choice will bring with it a lot of consequence.

And after a while, I said, yes, I'm sure I'm not going to go to school on Sabbath anymore.

And so that's when I began experiencing, you know, some of the avalanche of what it really meant to stand for God at 9 years old.

If you don't live bit, it's very hard to understand.

Because there were so many ramifications of this regime, should I say, then really they said 1 thing and they did another thing.

They were talking all the time about freedom, but freedom didn't exist.

I understand because some people, they are caught in this trap and they think it is the ideal to everybody to be equal, but it's not true.

You also didn't always have the best relationship with neighbors.

That's 1 thing that struck me was the neighbors that you had watching everything you're doing, reporting anything that they thought was suspicious.

In fact, including a neighbor, Didn't you have 1 who would just walk in your house?

Actually, we had very good relationship with them.

Serving them, taking pictures for them, but exactly how you said, they were informers.

Then they came suddenly without telling us, you know how we do here in America, you know, if we want to visit you, I have to call you and say, may I come, because I want to discuss something or ask you a question.

All of the sudden, then all the time, we should be very careful how everything you know because we we've been photographers we have to have work and if they would see we have a lot of work they would go and report that.

Now, were there certain things that maybe you wanted to do in life, but you couldn't do?

There were a lot of things, because before for a period of time we had the our business like photography business was covered in a in a way that we we had peace.

How did that even, you know, develop in your mind of leaving?

I mean, when you're locked down, you're afraid you're going to jail at maybe any time.

What even began to give you an idea you can get out.

You know what, what it's impossible for us, it's possible with God.

Then after that, where my parents lived, we saw an excursion in Turkey for 5 days.

And Lord, you know, I was talking with my husband and I said, what do you think if I and Speranza gonna go?

Under communism, you didn't have permission to travel with your entire family because they knew that if you were outside in the West, more than likely you would escape and you would not return.

But if they kept some of you back here, it's more likely you're going to come back.

And so that insurance was, you're not going to go with the entire family.

And so that in itself was their assurance that they would be able to bring back the family and so that was that.

I think that beyond that and the reason why this was so intense was because you know previous to that my aunt and uncle had traveled So it was not just our family, it was our entire extended family.

My aunt and uncle realized that they needed to escape.

My other uncle, who had actually been approached by the Securitate, the Romanian KGB, he had been approached and he was asked, told to be an informant against the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Romania.

And so He took a little bit of time and said, let me think about this, because the Securitate in Romania, there were informants in the church.

Every single Seventh-day Adventist church had an informant.

At least 1, if not more, that would inform the securitate what was happening and so they always had an eye on everything that you were doing.

That's the uncle I was thinking of because the way he got out of the country was a book all on its own.

As he was thinking about it, my other aunt and uncle had applied for an excursion, leaving their son back in Romania, the insurance, back in Romania.

So they were given the visa to go and visit Austria.

My uncle then paid a very large sum of money to someone who lived on the Danube, on the Danube, so on the border of what was then Yugoslavia, Romania and Yugoslavia.

Hope in Present Danger, Part 2

You wave goodbye to your husband, you see your dad, and you can't figure out what's going on.

Now what's going, what's the next thing that happens?

You're on the bus heading on a tourist vacation.

I think everything with that excursion was miracle after miracle.

But when we went to the in Bulgaria because Romania was here, Bulgaria was the next, and next was Turkey.

The guide just realized that none of us had passports because they didn't want to give us passports.

And you know in Bulgaria I was working with a list because it was communist country.

But when we went in Turkey, Turkey was a democratic country, and they expect us to have passports.

But the guide came to us and said, probably we have to return back to Romania.

Because we were thinking we went through all this and now all our hopes they were gone.

Then we've been praying and said, Lord, you can do a miracle.

And After about 8 hours, long time, the guide came and she said, they let us go in the country, in Turkey.

At the border, before we even went, you know, through Turkey, which was a miracle after miracle.

Another miracle that God did was when we were actually waiting at the border in Romania and we saw the militia men actually going through every single piece of luggage.

They were going through the luggage and all I could think of was what was gonna happen if they discovered the camera and the Deutschmarks in the camera.

And they were literally just emptying, you know, the luggage of the people and just making a mess of everything, you know, sometimes on the pavement.

And when our turn came, I remember that they didn't barely looked inside.

And it was at that moment that I realized, wow, God, you are with us.

You haven't, you know, you are with us because these people just, they barely looked inside in 1 back, because we had 2, in 1 back, they barely looked and they said, okay, thank you.

And so I think no 1 could have possibly imagined that a mom with a 14-year-old would even possibly think of defecting.

So, but I saw God's covering through that process.

But then right before the bus left, once again, these militia men came up.

And like my dad said, you know, they were informants in the bus.

And this man didn't have any luggage with him.

He only had a bag, you know, that was on his shoulders.

And so as we were ready to leave, we thought we were done.

The men stormed the bus again and they pulled that young man off the bus for us to never see him again.

So our heart is pounding and we're thinking, sure enough, what my dad said is true.

And then arriving in Turkey, feeling like we're going to have to be doubling up with a stranger that we've never met before, where we can't discuss anything, seeing informants literally parked at every other, or maybe 2 or 3 doors down from us, and I'm thinking, how in the world are we going to make it?

How are we going to be able to separate ourselves from the group?

And so, and just the bathroom with the water running was our safe haven, literally.

And that's where mom and I would just talk very little because we didn't know, is there a camera here too?

Is there something, is there somewhere that they are listening to us as well?

And so, and then yet, you know, through the process, we were supposed to go to the bazaar, I think the second day, and everyone got sick.

And even in that process, just thinking about that, they changed the plan so the bazaar, which meant that everyone was free to go and spread and go shopping and look for stuff and then meet again.

That trip then was postponed to the last day being in Turkey.

And little did we realize that if that would have been the second day, they would have had 1 more day to search for us.

Should we be able to actually separate ourselves from the group?

And then God switched the whole process, their plan, It switched the plan.

Everybody got sick, but funny thing, we didn't get sick.

At the same time though, that evening, I remember that the guide, right?

The tour guide mom, she asked us, can we join you at your table?

She said, I am so glad that nobody is defecting in this group.

And I, Esperanza was by me and I stepped on my foot, on her foot, not to have any reaction somehow.

So finally my mom is telling me what we're going to do.

She said, okay, tomorrow we're going to the bazaar.

And I thought, okay, well let's just, because we had a big piece of luggage and then a smaller, you know, little handbag, duffel bag.

And I thought, okay, well let's just put my clothes in that duffel bag.

And I started to do that and mom said, what are you doing?

And I said, well, we're gonna put the clothes in the duffel bag, my clothes.

She said, we can't put any of your clothes in the duffel bag.

What do you mean we can't put my clothes in the bag?

And so mom said, you understand we are going to separate ourselves from the group.

If anybody finds this bag, she said, they will immediately, that will be a giveaway, a dead giveaway that we are trying to defect.

She said the only thing we can take is the camera and the Deutschmarks inside.

So I had 1 little summer dress on me and mom the clothes on her back And so I realized at that point that that's all we could take.

And the thought was that she said, OK, we're going to go to the bazaar.

When we watch the entire group leave, we're going to try to separate ourselves from the group and we're going to get back into a taxi and we're going to take a taxi to the Austrian embassy she said and then we're going to tell them that we want that are you know that you're political asylum that we want political asylum and then that we want to be reunited with our family, my aunt and uncle in Austria.

And I remember mom actually writing in Turkish, in Romanian and translating in a little, little tiny dictionary in Turkish words, help, escape, political asylum.

And so I thought, how in the world are we going to separate ourselves from the group at that point.

We actually went into the bazaar, we were told that yeah in the bazaar that we could you know we could have a certain amount of time and that at 1.30 the group would come together.

Back from the Brink

I mean, we all have problems, but have you felt like you wanted to go a step further.

You should stay right here because we have an incredible story for you.

Thank you so much for coming today and sharing your amazing story.

Yeah, so my name is Danique and I'm from the Netherlands.

And my parents, they met in South Africa, where my mother's from.

My mom was a Christian, but kind of started falling away from the church started clubbing and met my dad Moved in together got married and unfortunately, she didn't marry the right man when they moved to the Netherlands, he got very abusive physically, and I grew up in that kind of household with my brother.

Physically with the whole family or just your mom?

Actually, from what I remember, mostly my brother.

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