You learn something new every day. I recently learned (I’m sure you already know this from science class in Middle School) that Mars has polar ice caps. I simply don’t remember learning that somewhere along the way.

So why this, why now? Well, a couple of weeks ago a little spacecraft called Psyche did a loop around Mars to gain momentum as it aims at its eponymous asteroid. As it circled around Mars, at a similar height to the Artemis astronauts circled the moon, it took closeup pictures of the Red Planet. Some of the pictures I saw looked blue – don’t know what that means.

But one of the pictures included a mostly brown spherical picture with a white blob on it. The white blob is ice. Now, as it turns out, we already have close-ups of that picture. It doesn’t look like our polar caps necessarily, but it’s interesting all the same, and well, conjures up some questions in my mind.

Questions like…How did that get there? Why is it still there? Why didn’t they film the movie “The Martian” there? Couldn’t Martians live off of that water? Inquiring minds want to know.

Deeper questions emerge, wonderings about the potential this reality presents. “Potentially” there was life there. Potentially there could be life there. I think potential is all about hope. We see potential in children. We see potential in relationships. We see potential in some business proposition. Any “potential” is a good thing. All good things come from God. So, potential is a gift. Here, on Mars, wherever.

Our polar caps are dynamic. They seem like monolithic desolate wastelands, but they’re not. Certainly, with global warming we see a lot of change in them. But and this is part of the “potential” thought, there is a lot of power under that stillness. In days of old, life was not as immediately evident, and it moved at a slower pace. (What do they call it- “at a glacier pace”?) But what power lies there? Have you seen ice fall from glaciers?

I think of God in that way sometimes. God is huge. And sometimes He doesn’t seem to move. God doesn’t seem to interact with me… (namely answer my prayers!)  But that doesn’t mean that God is not there. It does not mean that God does not move or have power. It just means that His power moves at a different speed than what I want or even perceive. Just as I wonder about the power that is held in reserve there on the caps of Mars, so I wonder about the power of God that I perceive to be inoperative, but maybe isn’t moving, simply because I don’t ask (James 4:2) or because I perceive God to be farther away than those little caps on Mars (Acts 17:27).

Finally, I think I like this new idea of Marcian polar caps because it offers something similar to what I know here, way out there. For example, I’ve been to Meteor Lake in New Mexico. It felt like the Moon, and in fact astronauts trained there many years ago. There are similarities between the Earth and the Moon there which are endearing. And likewise, the Earth and Mars have polar caps (and meteor craters). I see the signature of God in the universe when I see those similarities. I think that’s why I hope they find life elsewhere in the universe – that life will reveal more about God than anything else. Learning about God is the ultimate human endeavor.

Still grounded here on Earth,

Craig

God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him though he is not far from any one of us.

Acts 17:27 (NIV)