There was one album that could be considered the soundtrack to our transition from our mother's household to our foster family. This would have to be the Switchfoot album "The Beautiful Letdown". We were listening to it intermittently, probably without our biological mother's permission, in the months leading up to my sister Tracy calling Child Protective Services. Lyrics like "we were meant to live for so much more" and "I want more than just okay" and especially the song "Dare You to Move", with lines like "I dare you to move, I dare you to lift yourself up off the floor... The tension is here, between who you are and who you could be, between how it is and how it should be" were like a rallying cry. I think it was my sister Kayla's favorite album for quite awhile. I can hardly remember another album playing more often than that one after we came to the Siler's for a good stretch of time.

It was a song on the album they released after this one, the day before my sister Kayla's sixteenth birthday, that stuck with me. "The Shadow Proves the Sunshine" contains some of the best lyrics and philosophy I think I've ever heard in a "pop song". It also contained lines reminiscent of our situation, such as "two scared little runaways, hold fast til the break of daylight, when the shadow proves the sunshine". I think these two albums along with the two after this would have to be considered Switchfoot's golden era, their "Greater Mick Taylor" period, if they ever had one. There might be no band or artist I respect more as a whole than Switchfoot. Nowadays I don't even really like their music anymore, for the most part, and rarely listen to it. But the gap between the secular and sacred world that they were able to bridge is impressive.

It's an obvious line, and an obvious observation, "the shadow proves the sunshine". But it's unforgettable. And it's a reminder to be grateful to be here at all, that things will get better. What is in the dark will be brought to the light, as Luke 8:17 states so eloquently. Can't have darkness without light, and the contrast is meaningless, one without the other. Yin and Yang, as it were. It's part of why banishing the things that make us uncomfortable doesn't make complete sense to me. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. There's so much we don't understand, that we can't understand. If we're patient and confront these things, we may get an answer. Even if we don't like that answer. 

And at some point, it's best to quit asking questions, live your life, and move on. It's up to each of us to decide when, where and what that point is. 

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Humans, men and women alike, have selectively bred for traits that were admirable in their societies. The environment these people existed in killed off genes that contributed traits that were not beneficial to adapting to that environment. This is what survival of the fittest means, the genes that are best suited to adapt to a certain environment are the ones that proliferate, by enabling traits that allow the carrier to reach adulthood, and successfully mate, producing offspring, while those genes that are less fit die off. This is closely related to what is called Selfish Gene Theory, and there's a great book about the phenomenon by Richard Dawkins, called "The Selfish Gene". 

A massive part of human behavior is genetic, and certainly different cultures, for whatever reason as these groups split and fought and existed in their plains, mountains, islands, forests, etc., had different values, and the representatives of these cultures selectively bred for behaviors that embodied these values. Different breeds of dogs exhibit different behaviors. Researchers have tried to domesticate wild foxes, and bred these animals over successive generations, only allowing the pups of respective litters that exhibited friendliness to humans to reproduce. After 40 generations, and so about 40 years of selective breeding, they were deemed similar enough to other breeds in their proclivity for human interaction, virtual dependence on it, that the study garnered intense international interest and a number of publications in peer-reviewed academic journals11. If only 40 years of selective breeding can produce results of this magnitude, think about what 500,000 years (the generally accepted time frame for the existence of modern humans) can do.