Embark with me, Arlo Johnson, on a heartfelt journey through Vernon's soft winter as we uncover the remarkable intricacies of human sight. Imagine for a moment the sheer impossibility of another being placing value on your eyes, offering millions for the gift of vision you possess. Through the tale of a steadfast 92-year-old cowboy wrestling with macular degeneration, we'll explore the profound connection between our eyes and brain, and marvel at the complexity that even the most advanced technology can't replicate. I'll also share my own brush with the fragility of sight, how cataract surgery ushered in a personal renaissance of perfect vision, and the gratitude for medical marvels that renew our sense of wonder.
With the clarity of newfound sight, let's examine the boundless horizons faith in God's promises can reveal. The multitude of churches and diversity in beliefs may seem a muddle, yet one constant remains: our immeasurable worth in the eyes of the divine. This episode promises to fill you with optimism, as we remember that each of us is considered priceless, far beyond the limits of human valuation. I extend an open hand, inviting you to join me in this auditory embrace, where we find solace in the truth of God and Jesus Christ, and celebrate the hope that comes from believing in something greater than ourselves.
Embark with me, Arlo Johnson, on a heartfelt journey through Vernon's soft winter as we uncover the remarkable intricacies of human sight. Imagine for a moment the sheer impossibility of another being placing value on your eyes, offering millions for the gift of vision you possess. Through the tale of a steadfast 92-year-old cowboy wrestling with macular degeneration, we'll explore the profound connection between our eyes and brain, and marvel at the complexity that even the most advanced technology can't replicate. I'll also share my own brush with the fragility of sight, how cataract surgery ushered in a personal renaissance of perfect vision, and the gratitude for medical marvels that renew our sense of wonder.
With the clarity of newfound sight, let's examine the boundless horizons faith in God's promises can reveal. The multitude of churches and diversity in beliefs may seem a muddle, yet one constant remains: our immeasurable worth in the eyes of the divine. This episode promises to fill you with optimism, as we remember that each of us is considered priceless, far beyond the limits of human valuation. I extend an open hand, inviting you to join me in this auditory embrace, where we find solace in the truth of God and Jesus Christ, and celebrate the hope that comes from believing in something greater than ourselves.
Good afternoon. It's Arlo Johnson from Vernon, british Columbia, at 12.50 pm on January the 25th 2024. Coming to you today and I hope I'm finding you well and no bad sickness or something If there is. Hopefully you'll get a word soon. Our help is on the way.
Speaker 1:
Like they say, the winter is coming along here quite good in Vernon, british Columbia, and I'm hooking on the valley here. It's like 40 degrees Fahrenheit today, that's eight degrees above freezing. Snow is disappearing and we had some real cold days, at least one and a half days minus 20, 25 degrees below zero or two days, and then we had snow, most likely two feet of snow by now. Over that period it's down. Most places are struck right now, so that could be a very welcome winter. If that's the case, it's only another four or five days the end of the month and then in February and who knows, we've had people outgolping in February here before Could happen again. That means we've had a really rough winter, a whole one and a half days of it, and that suits me just fine and I don't know where you've been this winter, but hopefully you didn't have to shovel too much snow and didn't get too cold. I wouldn't wish that on anyone? I don't wish that on anyone. So anyway, I thought I would talk a little bit today about when God said you are wonderfully and miraculously, or whatever made. He wasn't kidding.
Speaker 1:
For instance, there's a guy that sits next to me here at our table. He's on my left side, a very nice guy. He's about 92, 93, always dressed very well, but he's an old cowboy, a cowboy, and he doesn't give that up. He has button down button shirts and western suits and stuff. He does something every day and he prides himself in that. But he has a scooter in the shed here but he doesn't really like driving it anymore because of his macular degeneration that's taking place. He's getting shots right in the eye for it now, but anyway he can't see the edge of the sidewalk. He does know where it ends, so he's scared to drive a scooter.
Speaker 1:
So what really made me think of this is I was reading something the other day about basically this scenario it comes along to you and says I want to buy your eyes, I'll give you ten million dollars for them, but I want both of them. Do you agree or not? I'll give you ten million dollars and you would most likely say no, I couldn't do that, so he could offer fifty million. You'd look at them and say can't do that either. In other words, your eyes and my eyes are priceless. What about the rest of the things? The eyes most likely are the most valuable thing this body has.
Speaker 1:
When you think about it, I forget how many nerve endings and stuff. The images register on the back of the eye and the receptors on the back of the eye send signals to the brain and the brain interprets these signals as an image and that's what you see, that's what your brain sees. Now they claim that the eyes can't be transplanted. The cornea can be transplanted, but not the eye. They say that there's a sort of a nerve center goes from the eye back and connects to the nerve deal that goes to the brain, but the main one is only about two inches long from the eye. The word connects to this channel, to the brain or whatever, but it's only about a fifth of an inch wide. But in that channel there's about a million nerve deals going through there, different ones. So there is no way that they can reconnect that.
Speaker 1:
Now how can that be? You know, it's just ridiculous, isn't it, when you think about it, for people to say we just, you know, progressed from a frog or a monkey or whatever. That is so ridiculous. You know we replicate and it's unbelievable how it happens. But a man sees a little tiny, little wiggly seed that gets into a woman's egg and buries itself in there, carries all this information. And how does that? I had no idea. And it has the information to create another human being and with a lot of times with the traits of the father. That's come from Skin color, you know, hair, everything that's pretty distinctive. You know either, if you're a white male, you most likely have a white job. If you're a black man, you almost likely have a black job, and it never fails.
Speaker 1:
Now you talked about priceless. That is priceless and you know I think about things like that that actually justify the fact that God tells the truth and Jesus Christ tells the truth, and you can't say that about anybody else. And it's not just on Tuesdays that they tell the truth. They always tell the truth and it's built into them that they are the ones who are the truth tellers. And it's you and I who can go off base and start believing a bunch of who we are, maybe make it up even, but you know it really hit home to me when I realized that something like your eyes blinded me with me now for another month or two it would be 90 years Still working. Not bad, chatteraxe yeah, chatteraxe.
Speaker 1:
I guess I had it taken off or something, and they did. They peeled them off and put a different, another lens on there and I ended up on 2020 Vision Not bad, eh, they got clouded over with this film of some kind and all they did is peel that off. How he did that, I don't know, but he did it one eye at a time and you know it wasn't painful really or anything. I just had to keep it covered for a little while and use drops and stuff in there. But I thought about it and I thought I had a little risky doing this. But I guess not really it's not such a risky thing when they do something like that. They do it every day. It's not that something can't go wrong, and then I guess they do once in a while kind of miss the mark a little, but they usually can fix it.
Speaker 1:
But you know to do something like that. You know the eye doctor. I go to an eye doctor, eye surgeon actually and he's oh, this eye, no, this eye, no, this eye. I couple of times my bottom eyelid drops down and you're looking at a red, open Kind of eye. I mean it's a little awful. And he pulls it up. Well, I've done it twice. My eyes start to look pretty red again. You might have to do it again. That's a, you know, a fixer-upper deal Like this, this one, this one is still okay, but the other one the muscle got much worse and it drops down.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I guess I've had a few adjustments. I had them go in and cut out and scrape out my prostate gland, and that's kind of been 10 years ago now and still working okay, but that was quite a deal. And then, unbeknownst to me, I well, basically I can't smell. I never have been able to smell. So if I, when I was living alone, I'd have stuff in the fridge that, you know, even a dog wouldn't eat, but I didn't know it. But I let something go too long and I ate it. I guess I think it was some meat or some kind, and I got, you know, food poisoning it's really what it was and I just couldn't quit.
Speaker 1:
I had to go to the hospital again to stop it and they did, and while I was in there, for some reason, they were sending me to have a test here and an x-ray there and a CT scan here and a full body deal it there, bone scan. And I said what is all this? Why am I doing this? I just came in here because I had a fricking diarrhea and they said we've got to send you to Kelowna. You're going to have to have steps put in your heart.
Speaker 1:
You've got three aneurysms, one of two. You've got two aneurysms. One is not too bad, but the other one is ready to blow. He said it's not bad, you've got to get in there right now. So you know what? They made two little slits down in my crotch, one on each side. I bought I don't know three quarters of an inch long maybe, and they went up one side with, I guess, a camera light and whatever, not the other side with knives and whatever they do, and they blocked off or cut out this big artery that was ready to blow and they ended up finding another one. So they put in three.
Speaker 1:
I didn't know anything about it. I was in there. I don't know if I stayed overnight, I don't think so. I think I was in there early in the morning and I went home in the evening and I had the operation, like you know, at 9 o'clock in the morning or something, and I ended up with two band-aids down there, that's it. And they just said be very careful, don't stretch too much or something, or it'll start bleeding, so careful. And I thought how can you do this kind of stuff? How did you go in there, pull the stents in there, and when they pull them apart, they get smaller and smaller, and when they push them together, they get bigger and bigger, and then they lock them in there and then the flesh or whatever grows into them and grows right into it and they're there. So repair has been made and I think that's quite an advance or something. I mean really, you know how tricky can it be. One goes in there and they do it on a screen. I didn't see it Because they what did I have?
Speaker 1:
Did I have an anesthetic? I forget. Yes, it was an anesthetic. When I had the prostate, they gave me a loco, or whatever it's called, in my back here somewhere and everything below that was frozen or whatever. And did that ever take a long time to get out of there? I honestly felt like both my legs were like 22 foot thick trees. They were so bulky and so heavy I couldn't move them. Oh my God. But anyway, my evening is kind of drifted off, yeah.
Speaker 1:
So I guess, when I think back on it, I had a couple of things happen, nothing, you know, nothing to particular, and I never gave a thought to it. I never wanted to say, oh, I got to have an operation, I did nothing about it, nothing. So I've been lucky, I guess, very lucky. Things happened to make me go to the hospital. At that time I didn't go to the heart specialist area there because I had diarrhea. No, the diarrhea put me in the hospital.
Speaker 1:
So they found out I had a heart failure. The doctor did a report for me that I had to send away a month ago and I looked at it before I sent it away, before I mailed it. And he had in there suffers from COPD what are you talking about and also had heart failure, has back problems, you know, makes it hard for him to walk sometimes. Well, that part's true. I didn't know I had COPD and I didn't know that my heart had failed. But I guess he classed that aneurysm deal as a failure.
Speaker 1:
I had to go ahead and repair the heart. Now, you know, when my dad was growing up, 50, 70 years ago, 80, 90 years ago, well over 100 years ago who wouldn't have that Couldn't have done that. That's quite a thing how things change. Thank you, I'm very glad of that. But you know, I'm glad that they did it and it was no great discomfort to me to fix something like that.
Speaker 1:
But I, uh, I don't think I'm the kind of person that you know. If something happens to me, I get sick or whatever then I'm gonna say, oh, you're gonna give me more pills, you're gonna do this. That you know I can't die now. I mean, I wouldn't do that. I don't believe that you should be kicking and screaming to try to live another day or two. You know we're gonna die. I've got a lot to die. Anyway, I know that you should know that Everybody dies. We're here on a temporary deal, just like the planet we live on. It's not forever. It's for a long time, but it's not forever. We're not forever either. And, uh, when you consider who, who we belong to and who put us together and who created that, it's not that he's creating people every day and hair, eyes and nose and whatever. No, he created a system to do this Bang bang, bang bang, just a replicating system. It's beyond anything that human mind could ever think of, mind could ever think of, never could think of that, or, you know, create that.
Speaker 1:
I was also listening and to somebody on well, I think it was on a YouTube channel, sometimes a religious channel speaker, and he was going on about the elect that. It's some place. I can't remember the name, the verse or whatever it was, but it's in the Bible. So we're God and, I suppose, the word Jesus. We're discussing the fact that the elite would be the ones that would be saved and they knew in advance exactly who they are or who they would be. Now that's the case. What percentage of human beings are elite? Are they elect? And how would you know? And the fact that God knows, knew in advance and planned for this, planned that Jesus Christ would have to die for this elite or elect to make it through this world in one piece and be acceptable to him in the next world, that's quite a plan. That's greater than any plan that human nature or men or women could ever devise, ever Like.
Speaker 1:
There's things that people say, oh, that can't be. I tell you it can be, the things that God has in mind for us. We haven't even thought about it, we can't even imagine it, not alone should wake people up. Should wake a person up and say, oh boy, there's a lot to look forward to here, and there really is a lot to look forward to for human beings that believe what God says, not what the professor says or a politician says or a preacher says. I shouldn't say everything a preacher says is wrong.
Speaker 1:
Some people are most likely pretty good that they don't tangle up on their own tangent and forget what God has said about things. There's ought to be a lot of that. When you have thousands of different kinds of churches and there's only one correct way to believe it, you know there's problems, but anyway, that shows how valuable you are when you consider just your eyes alone. All valuable, priceless. God looks at you being priceless. That's hard for a person to swallow, isn't it? And thank goodness it's that way, though. So, being you're priceless, I'm glad I met you. I haven't met you yet, but maybe I will someday. In the meantime, I'm going to ask God to bless this priceless person you are, and we'll see you later.