Center for Creative Ministry A research organization and research center for Seventh-day Adventist pastors and their congregations
The Father, the Son, and the Spirit
How do you land the one-ton Mars Curiosity rover, pummeling through the Martian atmosphere at over 13,000 mph, without turning the multi-million-dollar scientific wonder-robot into a tangled mass of wires and metal buried in the ruddy red soil?
The solution is the “Sky Crane” maneuver: lower the rover below a jetpack consisting of a “supersonic parachute, rockets, and cables.” The parachute and rockets slow the rover’s descent, and when the Sky Crane senses that the rover is settled onto the Martian surface, it cuts the cables and blasts itself away from the rover and flies over to a safe landing spot. Easy, right?
When NASA tasked engineer Adam Steltzner with the responsibility to come up with a landing process, he described the Sky Crane maneuver as “something Wile E. Coyote might rig up with ACME Company products.” He chronicles his adventures working with the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in his book “The Right Kind of Crazy.” The title comes from NASA administrator Mike Griffin’s reaction to the Sky Crane proposal—it’s crazy, but “it might just be the right kind of crazy.”
Steltzner couldn’t bring his crazy proposal to fruition without the help of his team. “You have to have” a team that engages in “vigorous intellectual debate” to pull something like this off, reflects Steltzner. “There isn’t a formula for what the next right steps are, so you have got to have a team that can check itself, interrogate its plans and understand if they are proceeding in the right path. To have vigorous intellectual debate, you need to separate the people from the ideas that the people hold. You need to respect and love and cherish the people and allow the ideas to do brutal intellectual combat.”
The team members “don’t have to be aggressive or loud,” he says. “You can be quiet and even retiring, but you’ve got to be willing to put yourself on the line to search for the truth. That’s what I look for. When I find that in an engineer, I know I’ve got somebody who can really get the rubber to the road.”
It makes one wonder—what were the team meetings like when the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit got together to plan how to create Earth and populate it with all manner of life forms, including us complex humans? Did They debate the pros and cons of the concept? At some point, They must have explored the possibility that the whole experiment could blow up in Their faces if these humans, empowered with the freedom of choice, made the wrong selection.
Somewhere along the way, They developed the roles that each Team Member would play in this adventure. It’s impossible to adequately describe this Holy Trio with our words, but we can envision Their teamwork using our feeble human references.
God the Father works the master controls in heaven, sort of like the Wizard of Oz. God the Son is heaven’s ambassador, showing up in physical form to reveal the magnificent love the Trio lavishes on us. And God the Spirit (sometimes described as a “ghost”), works invisibly behind the scenes, bringing us the power to live in that love.
Their teamwork is well and good, but what about Their contingency plan in case we bungled the whole thing up?
The plan of salvation must have sounded crazy to the rest of God’s universe, but for us, it’s the right kind of crazy.
For Reflection
Connecting: What is your favorite team that you’ve ever been a part of? A sports team? Students or co-workers laboring on a project? A musical group? What was it about working together that made that time so meaningful to you?
Sharing: John 1:10-13 implies that the Holy Trio works together to bring about our conversion experiences. How is it that we can be born again according to God’s will?
- The Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see the matchless charms of Jesus, and He attracts us to God’s will
- They all dangle the “eternal life carrot” before us, so we will surrender our will to the power of God’s Spirit
- God the Father sees when we are open to this new birth, and sends the Spirit to root out our faulty human will and replace it with God’s perfect will
- God arranges circumstances to put us in touch with Scriptural truth, and hopes that we will take the bait
- Conversion is a miracle that happens differently for every individual, but it always involves each member of the Holy Team
- Other:
Applying: What do you look for in a team when you plan a project? Do you want team members who always agree on everything? Do you include some who will play devil’s advocate and challenge the assumptions of the others? Think about how to assemble an effective team next time you lead a group to accomplish an assignment.
Valuing: Which member of the Heavenly Team do you most need to work in your life right now? Do you need the Father to arrange a special circumstance for you? Do you need to see a clearer picture of Jesus? Do you need Holy Spirit power to deal with some temptation or weakness in your life? Make it a point to pray for that particular Team Member to go to work for you
~ Chuck Burkeen
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| The James Webb Space Telescope’s latest data supports the Hubble Space Telescope’s previously gathered data which leads to the theory that the universe is always expanding.
“Now it’s up to the theorists to come up with novel hypotheses to explain these findings,” writes Ars Technica’s senior writer Jennifer Ouellette. And “novel” is an understatement. In her article “Latest James Webb data hints at new physics in universe’s expansion,” Ouellette quotes JHU cosmologist Marc Kamionkowski as saying: “One possible explanation … would be if there was something missing in our understanding of the early universe, such as a new component of matter—early dark energy—that gave the universe an unexpected kick after the Big Bang.” Kamionkowski adds, “And there are other ideas, like funny dark matter properties, exotic particles, changing electron mass, or primordial magnetic fields that may do the trick. Theorists have license to get pretty creative.” It seems that at this point in attempting to explain the universe’s constant expansion, no solid hypotheses can be formed, so in the meantime, creative and novel theories will be explored instead. What a large amount of faith it takes to place one’s hopes in inconclusive and indecisive evidence to support unexplained phenomenon, rather than to believe all was brought into existence by intelligent design, by the Author of the universe. Kamionkowski is correct when stating that something is missing in the scientific understanding of the early universe. Nature, the laws of physics, and Scripture all point toward that missing, critical piece in their understanding: God. Belief in Creator God, Master of the unexplained, is “the right kind of crazy” this world needs. Stefani Leeper | Content Coordinator Image retrieved from: quotefancy.com |
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