DAILY DEVOTIONAL ✝️   

Message in a Bottle

Several years ago a man in England was  walking his dog on the beach when he came across a bottle that had washed ashore.  Inside was a message from 1938 from a man named John Stapleford, asking whoever found the bottle to write to him in Hertfordshire, England. He once lived at the address given, but no one knows where he might be now, or whether he is still alive after more than  80 years…

 

There’s something romantic about the idea of a message in a bottle isn’t there?  Who knows where it will end up as unpredictable ocean currents carry it away.  

 

The scientific community puts messages in “bottles” and sends them out too.

The most famous example was in 1977 when messages were placed aboard the spacecraft Voyagers 1 and 2.  These messages included writings, recordings, and photographs to show whoever / whatever discovers them what life on Earth is like.  

 

The Voyager messages included Spoken Greetings in 55 human languages and nature sounds: Surf, wind, thunder, rain, and bird, whale, and insect calls.  Also included were human and animal sounds: A baby crying, mother soothing a child, footsteps, laughter, heartbeats, and various tools being used. There were 90 minutes of eclectic musical tracks spanning classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) and global traditional tracks, blues, and rock (including Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode").  Finally, there were 116 encoded analog images detailing mathematical definitions, solar system diagrams, DNA structures, anatomical drawings, landscapes, cities, and everyday human activities. 

 

Those Voyagers entered interstellar space in the last decade and continue to send signals and information back to earth.  But will anyone or anything (?) ever find these “bottles”?

 

What about us?  Do we fling our messages out into the sea of space, hoping for an answer of hope?  We call these messages “prayers”, and we long for God to find them.

 

Will God hear my prayer?  John gives assurance to all who are Christ’s followers: “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us” (1 John 5:14).  Note that John said God “hears us” - not that He will necessarily give us what we ask.  Even Jesus, God’s Son, had that experience in the Garden of Gethsemane (see Hebrews 5:7).  But God absolutely will hear His people’s prayers.

 

Praying to God is not at all like putting a bottled message into the ocean (or outer space), hoping that someone will one day find it.  Jesus made this promise to all His disciples: “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him” (Matthew 7:11).

 

1 Peter 5:6-7 instructs us to humble ourselves before God.  And then this is added: “Casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.”  

 

That’s why we pray! Because God cares about us!  He will find our bottle every time.~jme

 

THOUGHT  OF THE DAY:🤔  If you fell down yesterday, stand up today. ~H. G. Wells