What If God ...?
03-08-2021
By Brenda Pogue
As I reflect on the life of Jesus, I think about how vastly different life is now as compared to the lives of the original biblical writers who walked the earth with Jesus thousands of years ago. Then, I think about how starkly society has changed within my own lifetime, not even a hundred years ago. Imagine, walking from the Sea of Galilee to Capernaum was seventy miles. It would probably have taken Jesus about four days to make that journey.
A few years ago, I participated in a fundraising event for breast cancer. The goal was to walk sixty miles in three days, with an average of about twenty miles per day. There were planned meal breaks, port-a-potty stops, and water and snack stations along the route each day. At the end of the day, rest was had via two-person pup tents as sleeping accommodations. Medical tents were also strategically placed for those seeking healing. The first two days of the walk were met with typically warm, sunny August weather. Day three, however, was fraught with heavy rain. Misery abounded. I could have quit at any point along the way. I could have jumped onto the air-conditioned minivans that would take me back to the campgrounds. (I could have slept in the pup tents, but instead opted for the accommodation of a nice hotel room, booked with foresight by the event planners.)
I had trained for this event for nine months prior, yet completing this “race” was one of my hardest accomplishments. While this walking experience could have mimicked the walks taken by Jesus from city to city, I’m pretty sure that Jesus had no potty stations, no air-conditioned hotel rooms (or pup tents), no vehicles for weary travelers, and no quitting the walk. Jesus didn’t need training. Walking was the only mode of getting from hither to there. Quite a contrast to today.
Quite striking contrasts are also witnessed within my lifetime. For example, when I was born, my parents could not vote. Today, people must be activated to vote. When I was growing up, there were rotary phones but no cell phones; there were typewriters, but no laptops; there were vinyl records, but no streaming music. I grew up to see the invention of the television, when the picture was only black-and-white, and there were about seven TV stations from which to choose, but no cable TV. In my lifetime, I have witnessed all of these technical marvels that we now cannot live without. Yet, the human condition remains the same as when Jesus walked the earth.
What if God, who made us, gave us testimonies, human stories that speak to the human condition as chronicled in the Scriptures, to show us our humanness? Ecclesiastes 1:9 instructs that “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
