Our lives are in God’s hands

“Winter” has finally arrived. It is cool (at least by local standards) and rainy. Sweatshirt or blanket is needed at night. It has been cloudy and raining every day since New Year’s Eve which has superstitious locals worried. They say that for every day in a row it rains starting January 1, you will have a month of rain. By that reasoning it will rain through May now.

Normally this kind of weather would have started in late November or early December but I guess weather is messed up everywhere these days. This cool, rainy, stormy weather has contributed to several ship and even aviation disasters in the second of my worlds. Emergency response is basically inept and always too late. (I think everything has to go through a committee first, including emergencies.) One large passenger ship and at least two smaller ones sank this past week in stormy weather. 400+ people are still unaccounted for, though they continue to pick up a few survivors at sea each day. A plane went missing on New Year’s Day – and it still hasn’t been found. Early reports of it crashing into a mountainside with 12 survivors are now said to be false. Distress signals were picked up in a neighboring country but somehow not in-country though they say they have the equipment to detect such signals. No word on whether the equipment was functioning - or monitered.

All of this brings to the foreground the generally abysmal state of maintainence on vehicles, ships, planes, and equipment in general. There are also hints of management issues – profit being the highest priority. Of course it is all being blamed on bad weather, but it isn’t like bad weather is an anomaly. There’s always bad weather somewhere. But in a poorly maintained ship or plane, bad weather certainly adds stress to the system. Rubber bands can break and glue can come loose.

I too have to travel on budget airlines a lot. One of the main places I travel to can only be reached by a budget airline – or a 24-30 hour boat or bus trip. It is interesting that that particular airline has a card in all the seat pockets with prayers for travel safety printed on it – a Muslim prayer, a Hindu prayer, a Catholic prayer, a Protestant prayer, and a Buddhist prayer. Perhaps that is part of their maintanance system.

The underlying philosophy of life is this: our lives are in God’s hands. He knows the day of our birth and the day of our death. If it is our time to go, then we die. If it is not our time, then we will live another day.