Day 52 | Peter Pitocchi

I find it healthy to put things in perspective for a little bit.You live on a planet that is so perfectly positioned around our sun that it is literally called the Goldilocks zone by scientists because it is just the right distance away. We are  one random asteroid from dying. Some might say that an event like this is rare, but it has happened before, and the last time it happened, it was so huge it made our moon. Granted, if the first asteroid did not hit us at the exact time it did, we would not have a moon, and the axis of our earth would wobble, like Mars resulting in Ice Ages that would occur about every other year. If that one asteroid hit us any later, we would all be dead; if it hit us any weaker, we would not have a moon and would still be dead; if it hit us any earlier before we had the mass of a planet, we would be hit out of the Goldilocks zone, and probably sucked into the sun.Barring intergalactic disasters, we can look at ourselves. If we breathe in too much oxygen, we die of oxygen poisoning; if we do not breathe in enough, we die of suffocation. On the average, a human has to keep themselves in a temperature range of 4 degrees Celsius (40 degrees Fahrenheit), and 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit). A temperature range that is pitiful, considering that even this planet has locations that do not provide for this kind of environment. Even though we are in the freaking Goldilocks Zone, there is a zone of human survival that’s even smaller within that.Now let’s put this into Biblical perspective. We believe that God created the heavens and the earth. God made it so that you were positioned and born in such a planned and specific way so that we could love those around us and worship Him and make His creation beautiful. If he made it any colder or any hotter or positioned any of the asteroids to hit us with even the smallest miscalculation, we would all be dead. When God put us on here, we believe he did it so that His love could spread.However, we needed free will in order for the love to be real, so He gave us that as well. The second He did, we messed up. The fact that God has not scrapped us yet is a miracle considering the creation he made out of love has been at war with itself ever since Eden happened. Any other god would have scrapped us, but our God didn’t. If ours was a God of anything other than love, we would all be smited. However, we are not smited. In fact, we are being kept alive every second that we do not get nuked by North Korea or struck by lightning.This is not to say stuff like this might happen eventually, but it is to say that with us being big bags of guts and water, sensitive to literally everything, it is a surprise that any of us can make it past one year. It’s surprising that, given the thousands of cells we’ve had and thousands of new cells our body is making, that literally 99.999% don’t have cancer from birth. Every moment is a blessing, and no one understands that more than David who cheated on Bathsheba and killed her husband by putting him on the front line of battle in a world where the people who did stuff like that believed in complete damnation, especially since it was before Jesus died.This is why in Psalm 92:1 David says “It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, most High” because in Psalm 92, being a song for the Sabbath, he realizes just how powerful, and unbelievably merciful God is on perpetual sinners like us. To quote from the other Psalm, in Psalm 93:1g-2 we see the recognition of how much our world is kept in perfect balance when he says

“Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.Your throne is established from of old,you are from everlasting.”

My recommendation to those reading this Psalm, and in general to those who are praying,  is to thank God that our little bag of guts and water that is our bodies is not only able to live past a year, but that God makes it so even when we do not do what He so purposefully and meticulously made us to do, which is to love.