Well, it’s about 4:15 or so on February 1, 2003. My wife and I woke up extremely late today (after noon), and as such, we lived in the luddite world for a bit (no TV, radio, or internet on). Then a friend called and left the message that “the sky is falling”.
This exact same thing happened to me when the WTC disaster happened. I was asleep. I wake up, and then, as the guy from NASA said, “that’s when we knew it was going to be a bad day.” I live in North Texas. My parents and brother reported hearing the loud boom. Frankly, I’m still trying to absorb it.
The only thing I’m sure of is that everything we do on earth has some inherent risk in it. We go anywhere, we do anything, we even sometimes just breathe the air….No one is safe all the time. As for government funding, like I just said: the government helps build roads. They regulate airspace. They fund exploration into all sorts of areas. They also organize armies and navies. There’s inherent risk in anything a government endeavors to do.
A friend of mine explained life and death as the following: since the beginning of time, God has the tapestry that gets created and changed all the time. We only see our little piece of the picture, but the higher power above us sees the entire scope of it. Death is just a transfer from a limited view to a sense of knowing where we fit in to that tapestry. I also believe that God, in some sense, is limited by his previous work on the tapestry. He gave us the gift of knowledge and science so that we could fly on earth and then fly to outer space. But just like the gift of nuclear fission, there are consequences that come with it. Nuclear fission led to nuclear weapons, and space flight leads to disasters like the one that happened today. Could God intervene? yes, I’m sure He could, but we can’t possibly begin to know His plans and His purposes. Just as I may perceive God to be limited (as I stated above), so must I recognize that my own viewpoint is limited.
I pray for the families of the astronauts that lost their lives today. I pray for peace for not just them, but all of us.
Enjoying your page, Kevin. Hope to see you soon. We are in our new house! 😀
Kev,
I don’t know if you remember where you were when Challenger exploded. I was a senior in high school back home. I was in class, DECA if that means enything to you, and our teacher put the launch on tv for us. I had watched launches before and was the first in class to say, "That ain’t right." Just my 2 cents