Tuesday May 15, 2018. 1:33 p.m. Today is the day. Today, if Earth were human, the planet might well be holding its breath. Today, death will pass by. Destruction will wave but not stop. There will be no extinction level event, but the warning will sail along unobstructed reminding us that though the expanse of the universe is vast, accidents do happen.
Tuesday May 15, 2018. 5:05 p.m. (CDT). Today, 2010 WC9, an asteroid roughly the size of a football field, as long as the Statue of Liberty, will speed past the earth at 28,655 miles per hour. That’s 521 times faster than an ambulance delivering a woman in labor from Grand Marais to Duluth. (If I’ve done the math right, an ambulance traveling at that speed would arrive in Duluth in roughly .24 minutes or about 14 seconds.)
Tuesday May 15, 2018. 5:05 p.m. (CDT). 2010 WC9 is two or three times larger than the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded in the sky above Siberia on Feb. 15, 2013 (which broke windows in several Russian cities, sent more than 1,000 people to the hospital, and which I saw explode as we stood on an abandoned basketball court outside the town of Pignon, Haiti). That explosion was roughly 30 to 40 times stronger than the atomic bomb detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of World War II. And 2010 WC9 is two or three times larger.
Tuesday, May 15, 2018. 5:05 p.m. (CDT). 2010 WC9 will come the closest to Earth that is has in the last 300 years. It will zoom along 126,419 miles away. Close, but still considered safe passing distance. Exhale. Phew. Relief. If you are reading this on Friday or Saturday, May 18 or 19, 2010 WC9 did not change course. It did not get bumped by another cosmic projectile and wind up colliding with the planet, causing the destruction that supposedly led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 millions years ago. Aren’t you having a much better day now?
Tuesday, May 15, 2018 2:04 p.m. (CDT). Why bring up 2010 WC9, since it will likely be such a nonevent, in practical, personal, experiential terms? Because these kinds of “near miss but never was” crisis events make me think of providence and the role God plays in our daily lives. I have often fielded the question, usually from broken and wounded people whose lives have been sabotaged by some painful, heart-breaking circumstance: “Why does God let bad things happen to good people? What did I do to deserve this?”
This asteroid and the reminder of disaster it offers leads me to take a different approach to that gut-wrenching question and ask: “What keeps the most awful things possible from happening to everyone all the time regardless of whether they deserve it or not?”
In a world filled with violence, why is there ever a peaceful moment? In a world filled with the ugliness of greed and anger and selfishness, why are there ever occasions of unspeakable beauty? In a world marked by the futility of human effort, where advances of one generation are lost in the next generation (or even the next election) how can there ever be any truly authentic improvement?
How can there be good when evil abounds? How can there be grace where selfishness rules? How can there be hope when uncertainty reigns? Because, no matter what else there is, there is God.
If, as some are wont to claim, there is no God who is holy, and just, and pure, and gracious, and love, and good, and light, then there can be no lasting beauty, no true goodness, no real justice, no hope, and no light, only darkness.
What keeps the most awful things that could happen to everyone all the time regardless of what they deserve from happening? Not the impersonal universe that cares nothing for beauty or mercy or grace. Not the indifferent chance that cares nothing for human survival or joy. Only the personal Creator God who invests Himself in His creation would invest in our future and hold back utter destruction. This is the other side of providence.
The events of life are not meaningless where God is considered. Neither are the “non-events” meaningless. If we will search for meaning not in our personal experience, but in the heart and mind of the Creator of the world, we will find answers to even the hardest questions we face.
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