It's Friday, April 5, 2024.

I'm Albert Bowler and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from

a Christian worldview. These days, very modern people

are very accustomed to being thrown giant statistics. We have a massive economy. We're a massively complicated society. We're able to do

incredible things. We can send rockets into space. We can look through the

electron microscope and even other technologies and we can look at the complexity of things that

are just invisibly small but at the same time sometimes the size of what we get

into becomes quite a problem.

Just ask those who are looking at the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in

Baltimore.

One of the things many people miss is that that particular accident is an accident of scale, which is to say yes it happened

because a big ship lost power and eventually drifted into a pier of a massively huge bridge leading to the absolute collapse of the bridge and

yet the scale is a part of the problem.

And this is perhaps helpful for us to think about because we are increasingly accustomed to things

getting way outside of human scale. And to be honest, we now talk routinely about things which

are so out of scale we really can't imagine them. We can talk about trillions of

dollars but we can't imagine trillions of dollars. We know that's a matter of

reality and accountability. We want people to count those trillions of dollars rightly, but at the end of the day

we really can't get our minds around, say a trillion dollars, much less multiple trillions of

dollars. And then you look at other things you look at

say distances in space now I know we know or can determine many of those distances

but in honest terms they boggle the human imagination it's very hard for us to come up with anything analogous to those kinds of distances on a human scale.

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