Arthur Dent: “All my life I’ve had this strange feeling that there’s something big and sinister going on in the world.”
Slartibartfast: “No, that’s perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe gets that.”

~ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

I believe the mythical designer of terran fjords and fiddly-bits is mistaken.

There is something big and sinister going on in the world, and I think we all feel it. And we can let it lead us into paranoia and madness-that’s-even-worse and eventually total destruction. Or not.

It’s sin, plain and simple. And if you’ve read very much stuff I’ve written, you know that I believe sinleadstodeath sinleadstodeath sinleadstodeath.

And death is possibly the second-most pointless and absurd and frustrating thing ever, yet absolutely necessary because sin and self cannot be permitted to endure forever and ruin the ongoing effort to bring things back to the way they really ought to be.

Look around. Look at this world. It’s a perfectly gorgeous place on the whole.

Now.

Read a newspaper. Or if you’re not haply or happily literate and reading this anyway, watch a news broadcast on the telly. This world’s a mess. It’s not getting any better.

And it’s all because people make decisions largely or solely based on self-interest, then act on them. Casually, brutally, thoughtlessly — whatever. We act on whatever we want or want to happen.

Sin, in other words.

With no particular preperception or concern regarding the consequences, particularly for others.

Sin.

The single most pointless and absurd and frustrating thing in the world.

Sin has completely screwed up our planet.

And the Person who actually created it (no, it was not Slartibartfast) did not have sin in His intentions for us. It was not what He wants for us. It never was. It separated us from Him and from all the good and great things this planet could have been and that we could have been and might yet be.

Nevertheless He has a plan to restore all that, but it is more horrifically expensive than any custom-made planet built by the Magrathean WorldWerks, or whatever it was Adams called it.

The plan cost God heaven’s dearest blood, His own Son, tortured and slaughtered at the hands of man’s sin — but brought back to life by a love that simply cannot be obliterated, bought, sold, perverted, or turned only on one’s self.

And to me, the fact that there is something big and sinister and wrong in this world is the greatest evidence that there is something — someOne — far bigger and selfless and right beyond it; and He loves without limit and He wants to make things good and right and perfect again.

The way things ought to be.