It’s awesome to consider that we mere human beings are capable of concocting, designing, funding, and engineering a complex machine that can be propelled 350 million miles into space, land on Mars, and send back photos!
Unfortunately, the photos aren’t that exciting. They basically show rocks, sand, dust, and now tire tracks – things that are readily found on our own little planet. In 1969, my grandmother said that the whole “moon landing thing” was a production by Hollywood. Now, we’ve got something on Mars!
This is, however, truly promising! It’s good to know that, once we succeed in destroying each other on this planet, the survivors could have another planet to go to – to “try again.”
Do you think this is what God has in mind?
Consider “where we are.” The world seems to be going insane because man – human nature being what it is – is doing anything and everything he wants to do to his fellow man. When human life is intellectually and spiritually separated from its divine Source, anything goes. People can slaughter each other, kill babies in their mothers’ wombs, and fly airplanes into skyscrapers with little, if any, remorse.
Nor does man seem to care a whit about what, if anything, God has in mind, primarily because there is no consensus anymore about Who God is and what He/She/It really teaches. Such confusion makes it much easier to justify, rationalize and become worshippers of any opinion.
In the Gospel of Saint Matthew, we’re told that a certain man approached Jesus Christ and asked Him, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?”
In this day and age, we don’t ask such deep, penetrating and probing questions to just anybody. No! We go straight to google.com! Try it. I did – and got 437 million results! Can you say “overload?”
Psychologists, scholars, social scientists and “experts” are telling us we’re all in desperate need of “tech breaks” these days – that, without our even realizing it, technology is virtually killing two of our most precious “commodities” – our time and our patience.
It’s killing our time because whether it’s a game, app, or search-for-whatever, one leads to another, and another, and another – and, before one knows it, it’s 3:00 a.m., or supper’s overcooked, or an appointment has been missed. We’re like little children when it comes to this: “C’mon dad, just one more text, five more minutes of searching?!”
And technology’s killing our patience because we can book a two-week European vacation or execute complex business transactions in an average of 20 seconds, and then suffer road rage when it takes an elderly pedestrian 21 seconds to cross a street in front of us!
If we agree that this is true, yet continue to pursue the very things that separate us, cause enmity between us, foster hate and hostility among us, and which may ultimately lead us – individually and collectively – to our demise (perhaps eternally!), we need to ask why?
The question put to Jesus was, “what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” His answer was simple: “Keep the commandments.”
Only attentive ears, attuned to the voice of the Almighty rather than the noise of the world, will hear the correct answer – and abide by it. Others may eventually try to board a flight to Mars!