Michael J. Fox sat next to Princess Diana. He had gone to England in 1985 for the royal premiere of his movie Back to the Future. Before being led to his seat, Michael had downed a couple of beers to calm his nerves. “It hit me,” Michael recalls. “A sharp and unmistakable discomfort-I had to take a leak.” However, royal etiquette dictated that he could not get up and leave before the Princess. “My fantasy with a princess turned into two of the most excruciating hours of my life” (Reader’s Digest, May 2002). Invisible to everyone at the premiere was Michael’s distress. How often other people’s distresses are invisible to us!
Important values are often invisible to us in the daylight. A teacher asked her class, “When can you see farther – in the daytime or at night? Most students shouted, “In the daytime!” One quiet girl said, “In the daytime, the farthest thing we can see is the sun-92 million miles away. But at night we can see the stars that are invisible during the day. Those stars are much farther away than the sun.” Sometimes, we only see what’s really important in our lives when we are going through dark times and we get the glare out of our eyes.
The interconnectedness of all things is invisible to us, yet the Native American Chief Seattle said, “All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.” Likewise, modern physics is teaching us to see this invisible network. The “Holistic Education Network” website states: “The universe [is] no longer seen as a machine, made up of a multitude of separate parts, but as a harmonious indivisible whole, a network of dynamic relationships.” Isaac Newton saw God separated from the world. The new physics make us think of St. Paul’s words about God: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Possibilities are often invisible to us. Suppose you were driving your car on a stormy night. At a bus stop you see three persons waiting for the bus. There is an old lady who is about to die. There is an old friend who once saved your life. There is the perfect man or woman you have been dreaming about. Which one would you choose, knowing that there could be only one passenger in your car? Perhaps a possibility is invisible to you. Faced with that choice, one man said, “I’d give the car keys to my old friend and let him take the lady to the hospital. I’d stay behind and wait for the bus with the woman of my dreams.”
“It was by faith that Moses left Egypt without fear of the king’s anger; he held to his purpose like someone who could see the Invisible” (Hebrews 11:27, NJB).
Discussion
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