DX

In the parlance of shortwave radio and wireless cell communication throughout the world, distance is denoted as DX. In my lifetime, the world has become a very small place. In Spain, I examined replicas of the ships which brought Columbus and his crews to the New World in 1492. With today's trans-Atlantic and indeed the travel throughout the world, it is impossible to imagine the time involved and the trials involved in early travel. Think of the early settlers, with covered wagons and oxen, crossing the plains. I once said to a university senior who was driving for me, “I think we should stop somewhere and get a sandwich for lunch.” And then I said, “Can you imagine what it was like for the early settlers to have food provisions.” He said, “I'm sure they stopped at a McDonalds.” Can you just see a wagon train of covered wagons and oxen stopping at the big arches? This boy was serious. Our young people have no idea of what life was about even two hundred years ago.

The greatest distance in the world, and I say this with all sincerity and conviction, is the distance from the cross of Jesus Christ to the place in front of the cross, where most people stumble. Instead of getting to the cross, clinging to the cross, and showing everyday, in every way, their willingness to take up His cross and follow Him, they stumble over denominational beliefs – their desire to hold onto the world with one hand and grab at the cross with the other. Their total un-commitment to take God at His word and depend entirely on their TRUST in Him is sad.

Ezra Pound, the poet, said, “The worst thing in the world is for young men to go to war and die for their country, when they did not fully realize what they were fighting for.” Most church goers just want fire insurance. As one black church member told me, “I hang onto the church just in case there's something to it.” The Black Nationalist churches have promoted such a heresy – just a voodoo type belief system, good only for earthly deception. The soldiers of the cross, the Christian who has been born again, redeemed by the blood of the lamb, baptized in obedience, know that faith is action, based on belief, sustained by confidence. We know that we have confidence in the fact that we have moved from darkness into His marvelous light and are new creations in Him. There is nothing so pitiful as unsaved church goers. There is nothing so pathetic as a lost preacher in the pulpit – the blind trying to lead the blind.

The real Christian worships and depends on a God who can hold the oceans in His hand; who measures the height of Mount Everest with His fingers; who can dip His toes in the Mariana Trench (the deepest place in the Pacific Ocean); who has the very names of His trusting children written in the palms of His hands. When visiting Pisa, Italy, standing by the great Leaning Tower of Pisa – the baptistry of the great cathedral there – I could well imagine Galileo looking at the stars from his first telescope in 1609; or dropping out the cannon balls from the tower to measure their weight – distance correlation. How different today with the great Hubble Telescope in space, traveling 150 million miles a year and giving enough material for 6,000 scientific articles.

“Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: He calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that He is strong in power; not one faileth.” (Isaiah 40:26)

The starry host can never be measured by man. The distances are just too great. How pitiful it is that believers in God cannot comprehend that they have at their very fingertips, on their very lips, the faith that can empower them to draw on the reserves of the sovereignty of God. How pitiful it is that, instead of our depending on our faith in God, we resort to the very short distances of our faith and dependence on one another. How pitiful it is that we want God on our terms, not willing to submit to God's terms.

Last week an airliner overshot its destination by one hundred fifty miles. This should test the faith of every person boarding an airliner. Airlines so intent on looking in a baby's diaper or checking the feet of a wheelchair-bound elderly lady, yet with pilots in the cockpit and other personnel who do not realize what is going on, 30,000 feet in the air when any glitch in any airliner process would mean certain death to everyone aboard.

I stopped flying many years ago. After having traveled around the world eight times, I remember one around-the-world trip was forty-eight separate flights. I witnessed the spending and spreeing, drunken brawls of pilots and other airline personnel in hotel rooms and around hotel swimming pools. Do you think for one minute that all the illegal drugs sold in and around airports are purchased by the janitorial personnel who barely make enough money for life? Addictive drugs are purchased by people who make the big dollars such as airline pilots, doctors, lawyers, politicians, who have an excess of income.

A mosquito on a railroad track shouts at a locomotive bearing down the track, “I don't believe in you!” Poor, pitiful, humanity proclaiming that they do not have faith in God, that, “they do not believe in God.” Please tell me what they do believe in, that they could take the risk that they take in traveling on an airplane with doped, unconcerned pilots; traveling in an automobile on disastrous highways with doped, unconcerned drivers; wheeled into an operating room with doped poorly-trained technicians. Recently, at a VA hospital, I said to a physician in charge, “The technician working outside does not know what she is doing.” He did all the work she should have done over again, and said, “this place is full of people who do not know what they are doing.”

About two years, ago a young graduate of a Chicago university, after working for me for a few days, went home and put adhesive tape over his eyes, trying to determine how I have lived my life for nearly 50 years as a totally blind person. He said it did not last but a few hours, “I just could not put up with it and I don't know how you handle it.” I said, “I had to make up my mind a long time ago to 'walk by faith, not by sight' (2 Corinthians 5:7).” Now, more so than any other time in the history of the world, we need a faith not only to die by, but a faith to live for.

You voters have given matches to those you have elected to burn down the White House, the state house, the court house and even matches to burn down the school house, the church house and in many cases, your house. It is going to take much God-given faith to rebuild these institutions.

“Faith is the victory that overcomes the world.” John H. Yates