“It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows; for so He gives
His beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2)
I’m told that as a person ages, he requires less sleep. I’m there now, but I never was a sound sleeper. And of course, it’s worse when one is not in his familiar bed. Western Europe is a good place for insomniacs like me. Europeans think about those still awake, and they feel sorry for us. They have several ways to try and get us to shut our eyes. Not so in America—television has little sympathy for us. What they show when normal people are slumbering is banal, boring, ludicrous or disgusting.
In France and Germany however, people dressed in sheep outfits play leap frog on TV. It’s tedious and meant to be, I suppose. What I enjoy on another channel is the view from a satellite—a spaceship with a powerful camera attached and focused down on the earth constantly circumnavigating the globe. It’s awesome and magnificent to behold. I love to look down and imagine myself lying in a strange bed in a foreign hotel from an angel’s viewpoint. So many thoughts and impressions race through my mind.
Indeed it is a beautiful world. We have now its photograph from outer space on our postage stamps. It should make us all proud—that God loves us so much as to give us the blessing to exist on such a lovely planet—that’s self-evident; but that He loves us so much that after we fouled it all up and were hopelessly enmeshed in sinfulness, He would come to our rescue. He did so by agreeing to be one of us, born the way we are, even to poor and humble people at a time when their nation was occupied by a powerful and pitiless empire. You know the rest.
Yet from up there the misery and suffering that continues without abatement is not evident. I have a home down below. I chose to leave my home and visit a foreign land for some reason. I have the means to rent a room in a hotel wherever I wish and return home when I please. I’ll be readmitted because I have a passport that entitles me to all the rights and privileges of being an American citizen. And I take all of this for granted.
How many are there who are homeless even in the country where they were born and where they will die prematurely? There are orphan children in South America huddled in doorways to share the warmth of each other’s bodies, abused in multiple ways, doing whatever it takes to keep from starving. There are those who consider themselves fortunate to slip into a wealthy nation and exist there constantly hunting and being hunted. Dante, the famous author of Divine Comedy wrote of what it feels like to “eat the bread of sorrows,” or as he put it, climb up a stranger’s stairs and eat his bread.
And like many in our times I’m concerned with the possibility of life in other galaxies and whether communication with them is possible in our lifetime. Would they come to visit us, and would their visit be friendly? Decades ago we had sent out a spaceship with signs that our NASA people felt to be symbols of friendship. But maybe an intelligence superior to ours on earth has found “Voyager.” Perhaps they’ve already investigated planet earth, and if so they may have decided to stay away. We think of ourselves as essentially a planet of peaceful creatures, but maybe we’re wrong—especially from outer space. America is among the most violent of nations.
These are some thoughts of an insomniac away from home, looking down on the earth with the help of a camera fixed on a spacecraft circling our world.