Can you imagine riding on a space ship that races along at 67,000 miles per hour – more than 1,000 miles per minute?
Our Maniacal Reality
Suppose this hurdling spaceship begins tumbling end-over-end at a rotating speed of over 1,000 miles per hour– can you imagine what that would be like? Then suppose this hurdling, tumbling spaceship gets caught in a vortex that whirls around at 45,000 miles per hour and this vortex gets caught in a bigger whirlpool speeding at an incredible 500,000 miles per hour! What a crazy, wild ride that would be! Such a ride would be lethal to our constitution – to say the least! The maniacal motion would drive us mad! The G-forces would crush and disintegrate us, right?
Actually, such a ride would not be so bad. How do I know? Because every day of our lives, we are on that ride. That’s right. We are on a spaceship called Earth that flies through space around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour and spins at 1,040 miles per hour.
And the solar system, of which we are a part, moves through our galaxy at 45,000 miles per hour. And while we are moving along at such breakneck speeds within the outer wing of our great spiral galaxy, this outer wing itself moves at an incredible 500,000 miles per hour! But as scary as it sounds – you’d hardly even notice it.
Fear Cripples, Trust Nourishes
“There have been a great many terrible things in my life,” Mark Twain once wrote, “only a few of which have actually happened.” True. It’s not the actual living that is so terrible. It’s our fears and dreadful anticipation of what the journey holds that we find unbearable. Our dread of tomorrow cause an anthill to cast the shadow of a mountain.
We anticipate tomorrow to be immensely worse than God will ever allow it to be.
And if the journey God has mapped for us is “fast-paced” and “tumultuous,” don’t worry. God will so shield and strengthen us that we’ll hardly notice the speed.
“Fear thou, not,” says God, “for I am with thee. Be not dismayed, for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness” (Isaiah 41:10).
Prayer
Dear Father in heaven, keep me as the apple of your eye and protect me safely in the hollow of your almighty and all-loving hand. Amen.
