Outside Bryson City is road they call “The Road to Nowhere.” It was begun as a road along the north side of the Tuckaseegee River and Fontana Lake. After they had built a quart-mile tunnel, they decided to halt construction to preserve that part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. So the road goes to the tunnel. You can park, walks through the tunnel and then you are in beautiful woods.

That’s great, but we don’t want to be on a road to nowhere. With that firmly in mind, let’s join Jesus as he sails across the Sea of Galilee.  Just crossing the lake is a short trip that took them to an entirely different view of the world, the cosmos and humanity. While some Jews lived there at the time, this region had Greco-Roman culture. They are pagans. They worshipped the Roman gods and goddesses of their choice.

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When I was a kid, I had a great aunt who worked for NASA and lived on the north end of Cocoa Beach, not on the beach but a block away. Their little block house had a flat roof, and we would often go to her house and climb up on her roof to watch the Apollo launches. The whole world shook.

She was my grandfather’s sister, on my dad’s side. Their parents, my great-grandparents, lived with her and her husband in their last years. I remember my great-grandfather in his recliner with a jar of some kind of peppers, offering to give me a quarter if I would eat one. (I knew better!)

After my great-grandparents died, things took a lousy turn. When my great aunt moved them in with her, she essentially took all of their stuff. They were not at all wealthy, it was just stuff, but she refused to even talk about it. That caused a permanent rift between her and her two sisters as well as my grandfather. I don’t think the three of them ever spoke to her again.

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This past week we had a wonderful Vacation Bible School, created and led by Christopher and Tiana Maslanka. The kids followed an undersea exploration that also probed the depths of The Lord’s Prayer, verse by verse. I loved it. Our oceans are so important and they are under a lot of stress. It was great to see the kids learn about that, and the Lord’s Prayer is central to our faith so it was great to see them learn more about that.

It reminded me of another undersea voyager.

A little over 8 years ago, the British National Oceanography Centre launched a new, state of the art, unmanned submarine designed to gather vital data from the deepest polar waters. It was and is very high tech and cost about $270 million, which was a lot of money 8 years ago.

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