My wife has been busy all afternoon in the kitchen...I just sat down a few feet away to work on this post and asked her if she would turn the music off for a little while. She looked over at our Sonos speaker and said...."Google....turn music off"....but Google didn't obey....so she gave the command a second time....and louder a third time....then sheepishly turned around and pushed the off button on the Panasonic radio under the cabinet.
One of the fascinations in my life has been the Titanic. I watch the 1958 film A Night To Remember a few times it seems every year....sitting before it almost as I would a sermon. A friend recently loaned me some of his Titanic materials....8' blueprints every bit as detailed as those that Thomas Andrews and Captain Smith looked at in the film....and volume one of a book so detailed that you could find all the specifications of any piece of the ship's equipment if you so desired.
There have been many ship sinkings more disastrous as to loss of life than the Titanic. The side-wheel steamboat....Sultana.....was grossly over-loaded with Union soldiers just released from prison camps after the Civil War ended. She sank on the Mississippi after a boiler explosion. Loss of life and survivor figures differ in the various sources....but they were roughly the same figures as the Titanic. Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed twelve days before the Sultana sinking.
The Titanic was a British registered ship....of the British White Star Line....but owned by an American company. Great crowds cheered as she was launched. You see....not only was she grand beyond imagination....but she was unsinkable! She was a testament of what great things that man was capable of doing!
I have long felt that the sinking was an omen for both Great Britain and America....as two world wars and a depression followed....and I also have felt for a long time that the Challenger disaster of 1986 was an omen for America and the world....as I've written of it in previous posts with...."its multi-cultural crew...male and female...scientist, military and civilian...Caucasian, Asian, African-American...Christian, Jewish and Buddhist."
We have had since then Middle East wars....and 9/11....and a pandemic....along with a collapse of society....and evangelicalism....and now the worst possible election cycle that anyone could ever imagine.
As you can read in Genesis 11....after the flood....the people were going to build a tower. We're not sure the exact purpose they had in mind....but we do know that it was a common belief that the gods resided on the tops of mountains. Whatever it was....it was surely a challenge to God.....and He was going to put a stop to it....similar to today where scientists are certain that within a few years....we can mesh the computer with the human brain....vastly increasing the neurons....and thus its potential power. Well....God will put an end to that also.
What surprises me most today....is that we will be stirred by the warnings of a podcaster....or a radio talk show or cable news show host....but have no interest at all in the warnings of God! It's kind of like the inverse of that little anecdote at the beginning of this post....where we are looking one way....but the sound is coming from behind us!
