Mind Blowing

They con­sid­ered clos­ing the US Patent Office at the turn of the last cen­tury, because they believed that just about every­thing that could be invented had been invented. They could not have been more wrong. FDR once made the state­ment that it was impos­si­ble for an air­plane to sink a ship. In my twen­ties I too had all of the answers. Now that I am approach­ing sixty, I sim­ply have questions.

There is noth­ing more dan­ger­ous than hav­ing a cou­ple of years of col­lege. The term “sopho­more” means wise idiot. Arriv­ing too soon is the best way of really embar­rass­ing your­self years later. His­tory is filled with idiots that had the answers before they ever got to the ques­tions. Even Albert Ein­stein resisted the impli­ca­tions of his own find­ings. It is one thing to be smart but quite another to be open.

On the road to Emmaus, a stranger walked along with a cou­ple of peo­ple that had their polit­i­cal expec­ta­tions dashed. They were stuck in a false par­a­digm. Mes­si­ahs were not sup­posed to die. As the dis­cus­sion con­tin­ued, the stranger opened their minds. When they rec­og­nized him as the risen Jesus, he dis­ap­peared. The event was mind blow­ing. They were never the same after that. The story of their expe­ri­ence con­tin­ues to spread.

Being open to pos­si­bil­i­ties takes some real work and a lot of courage. Being con­tent with inad­e­quate infor­ma­tion is the easy route to a dead end. If your world view fix­ated decades ago, you will feel lost or even bit­ter as you age. The cre­ation con­tin­ues to unfold. It is not only beyond what we imag­ine but what we CAN imagine.

I have always been one with an eye to the fan­tas­tic. It brings a smile to my face. In the end, it is the bet­ter bet. The laser has not been around all that long. We have already got­ten used to its “mir­a­cles” in surgery, music, print­ing, and thou­sands of other appli­ca­tions. It started as a piece of sci­ence fic­tion. The most mind blow­ing real­iza­tion is that not only have we not arrived but that we never will - for all of this is con­nected to the Infi­nite Eternal.