Changing the Future with a Deep Breath

Suggested Reading: Daniel 6:1-16 (or read the whole story here)

If you aren't familiar with Doctor Who, you aren't aware that the British television series features an alien called The Doctor, who travels through space and time solving problems and saving people from monsters. Often in the show, some nefarious alien species has altered time for their own benefit and the Doctor has to restore the timeline to save everyone. Every now and then, though, he encounters a fixed point in time, something that cannot be changed no matter how hard you try or how much time travel you do. Occasionally, even in the time travel realm of science fiction, some decisions can never be changed. They are permanent. Final.

In Daniel 6, Daniel found himself in a land where the king's law could never be changed. According to the laws of the Medes and Persians, any law the king made was a permanent law, without exceptions and without equivocation. So when some of Daniel's co-workers wanted to get rid of Daniel out of jealousy, they convinced the king to sign a law making it illegal to pray to anyone but the king for 30 days. Then they set the penalty for praying as being thrown into a den of lions. Once it was signed, they went and caught Daniel praying to God as they had predicted he would, and then ran to the king. The king hadn't considered this possibility and looked for a way to save Daniel from the law he had foolishly signed. But in the evening the men went together to the king and said, “Your Majesty, you know that according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, no law that the king signs can be changed.” So at last the king gave orders for Daniel to be arrested and thrown into the den of lions. The king said to him, “May your God, whom you serve so faithfully, rescue you" (Daniel 6:15-16, NLT).

The king had made a permanent decision without thinking through the consequences. I guess that makes him just like us sometimes. We burn bridges without thinking about whether or not we will need them in the future. We cross lines of innocence and purity that can never be uncrossed. We make decisions about relationships based on surface level emotions. We make life-altering decisions that can never be undone just because it feels like the right thing to do in a single moment or because someone flatters us and our good judgment goes flying out the window.

Sometimes, we face decisions that don't have significant consequences. But frequently we make decisions that will have a lasting impact we have no way of foreseeing. When we face decisions, we must take a step back and think through the consequences. Maybe you can live with that decision now. But will you be able to live with that decision when you can't reverse it? Will you still be comfortable with that decision ten years down the road? Or sixty?

Before you make a life-long decision, take a deep breath and work through the possible consequences. That deep breath might be the only thing that stands between you and a lifetime of regret.

Answering Doctor Who's Prayer

Suggested Reading: Luke 18:1-8

There was an episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor was trapped in a place he'd been sent to via transporter, a place where, each day, everything in the room (including himself) reset to the way it was when he arrived. Being the doctor, he was able to figure out that this had happened every day for approximately 4,000,000,000 years. But he didn't let that stop him from continuing the same routine every day as he slowly made progress toward escaping. He continued doing the same thing over and over again because he believed it would eventually work and it did.

In Luke 18, we see Jesus tell the Parable of the Persistent Widow. This widow, who desperately needed the judge to grant her justice, came to the judge day after day after day. So, even though this judge as a man who "neither feared God nor cared about people," (Luke 18:2, NLT)  he eventually gave in and granted her justice just so she would stop pestering him. Jesus concluded the parable by asking, "So don't you think God will surely give justice to his chosen people who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will grant justice to them quickly! But when the Son of Man returns, how many will he find on the earth who have faith?" (Luke 18:7-8, NLT). Jesus was addressing those whose prayers for justice (and perhaps other things) seem to go unanswered. That's why he said, "Will [God] keep putting them off?" Their prayers haven't been answered yet. The passage seems to imply that by the time Jesus returns, many of those prayers will still not have been answered and that those who keep praying are those whom "he will find on the earth who have faith."

What if the Doctor had gotten to the place where he finally decided that nothing was ever going to change and simply gave up? What if he stopped believing that doing the same thing day after day was eventually going to work and he just stopped? Sometimes, that is how we treat prayer. Sometimes, we stop praying for a particular person to be saved or healed because we stop believing it can ever happen. Sometimes we let our prayers go unsaid because, somewhere inside, we've stopped believing that they make a difference. So, rather than be faced with the disappointment of possibly unanswered prayers, we just stop praying. Or sometimes it is just easier not to think about that need than to continue yearning for something that, in our opinions, is taking too long to happen.

Yes, sometimes, what we pray for take a long time to happen. And sometimes we stop praying for it to happen. But have we stopped praying about it because we completely trust God to make it happen and have left it in God's hands? Or have we stopped praying about it because we've stopped believing anything will ever change? You are the only one who knows why you've stopped. So tell me, when the Son of Man returns, how many will he find on earth who have faith?

Joining Google in the Quest to Extend Life

Suggested Reading: Exodus 20:1-17

A recurring theme in science fiction is the quest to live forever. Whether it is a woman from Doctor Who whose extreme surgeries have left her as nothing more than a thin film of skin that has to be constantly hydrated, a old-woman from Smallville who sucks the life-force out of teenage boys in order to live as a teenage girl, or alien life-forms from the original Star Trek who build artificial bodies to house their minds, people are always imagining ways that they can live longer. Even now Google is looking for ways to overcome death. 

Sadly, even many Christians forget about a method that is backed by a divine guarantee. Exodus 20:12 reads, "Honor your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord your God is giving you" (HCSB).

Especially while we are growing up, but even once we reach adulthood, our parents have a wealth of knowledge that we can tap into if we remember to do so. Our parents give us instruction, warnings, and words of wisdom that they have often learned from cold, hard experience and wish to save us  from learning the hard way as well. When we honor them, when we listen and ponder the advice and instruction they give us, we often save ourselves a lot of trouble that we would have encountered had we just done what our inexperience told us was best.

I know that not all parents are good and some have even been horrible. But that doesn't mean we cannot learn from their experience. It is entirely possible to watch the lives of one's parents, see their mistakes and their failures and learn from those, even if they have never shared those things directly with us. Even learning from our parents' mistakes can be a form of honoring our parents as we ponder their lives and attempt to learn from them.

Whatever form it takes, whether they deserve it or not, God has promised us that honoring our parents will lead to longer lives. We probably won't learn the secrets to eternal youth or indestructibility, but the longer life we lead will certainly be a wiser one.