distance

A friend called the other day all excited about the Green Comet coming by earth that night. The comet’s green-glowing atmosphere is about the size of Jupiter—about 300,000 miles wide. It has two tails, one facing the sun and the other facing away. And this would be its only trip through our solar system, so we’d better not miss the 3:00 a.m. spectacular! Pictures like the one above had me all excited.

Turns out, though, that this fly-by was going to be 38,000,000 miles away and, if visible at all, it’d only be a faint speck. All of a sudden this really big comet seemed really far away and really unimportant.

In the late 60’s I was growing up as a missionary kid among the Duna People, a stone-age tribal group on the island of Papua New Guinea. The Duna world was trying very hard to comprehend all this new and amazing stuff—medicine, radios, airplanes and so on. At one point, Dad and Mom were explaining to some of them that people had actually gotten in one of these airplane-like vehicles and landed on the moon! Their question was, “How could that big airplane and several people possibly fit on something that small?” After all, isn’t the moon about the size of your thumb?

Distance makes things seem really small, doesn’t it?

It’s true for hearts, too. When a heart gets far away, devotion and love usually suffer. (Is that why they say distance makes the heart go wander?) Distance just changes things.

God feels it, too. You can almost hear the frustration in His voice: “These people honor Me with their lips but their heart is far from Me.” ¹ Distance just takes the fun out of love. I mean, who wants to be far from the one you love?

So here’s a prayer for any of us with hearts prone to wander: