Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block
to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
People who never go anywhere never have to worry about stumbling. Some people who do fall,
like Marconi, end up falling forward. The person who never makes a mistake never makes
anything else either.
Peter was a person of action. He made his mistakes, but at least they were not those of a man
afraid to get in the arena.
(Matthew 16.23
NRSV)
It is encouraging to know that Henry Ford forgot to put a reverse gear in the first car he invented.
Also, he didn't build a door wide enough to get the car out of the building he built the car in. If you
go to Greenfield Village, you can see where he cut a hole in the wall to get the car out. But he did
get it out and the world has never been the same. Sometimes people of action happen on
advances even when they are in the wrong. Consider the father of the wireless, Marconi. As
Marconi increased the power and efficiency of his equipment he found that he could send
wireless waves over longer and longer distances. Finally, he became bold enough to think about
transmitting a signal across the Atlantic Ocean itself. It seemed only a matter of having a
powerful enough transmitter and a sensitive enough receiver. The experts who knew better
laughed at the idea. They assured him that since wireless waves, like light, traveled in straight
lines, they would not follow the curvature of the earth, but would stream off into space. Logically
the experts were quite right. But Marconi tried, persisted and succeeded in sending a signal
across the Atlantic. Neither Marconi nor the experts knew about the electrically charged layer in
the upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, which bounced back the wireless waves that would
otherwise have streamed off into space as predicted by the experts. It was only this layer which
made communication possible. By being wrong Marconi arrived at a conclusion he could never
have reached had he been rigidly logical all along.
God of action, help me to be bold in action, so that I can spread your love. Amen.
