Major Malfunction

It was a normal January day. I had been working at the church in Elizabethton, TN. and lunch time came, so I headed down the street to my home for lunch. When I walked through the door, I could tell something was terribly wrong. There sat Marie, our baby sitter on the couch with a look of horror on her face. At first I thought something had happened to Jenny, but as I came into the den I realized what was wrong. On television they were reporting that the space shuttle, Challenger, into which so much work had gone: that first shuttle on which there had been civilians; the first shuttle on which a wide eyed, expectant, excited school teacher had ridden, had exploded in mid-air. I watched, with that sickening feeling you get inside when something terrible happens, as they replayed the tape of the disaster over and over again. I listened as the impersonal voice of the Houston space Center announcer droned time and time again: “Obviously a major malfunction”... OBVIOUSLY!

How much like our lives this is! About the time we finally get it together; about the time we’ve gone through the hard preparation and have conquered our last frontier; about the time we’ve “blasted off” and set the controls to automatic pilot, OUR WORLD EXPLODES AROUND US. It may be a wayward son or daughter, an unfaithful spouse, a close friend who disappoints us, the loss of a job, financial reversal, an unexpected, unfavorable diagnosis, or any number of other unwanted disappointments that bring us crashing back to earth. And we wake up afraid, confused, hurt, and yes, even angry.