It’s not a good day for the power of positive thinking.

News of the Germanwings Airbus A320 crash into the French Alps raises soul-chilling questions that may never be answered.  Early reports assume 27 year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, left alone in the cockpit, deliberately plunged the plane and its terrorized passengers to their deaths.

I need some good cheer on a day like this when it’s hard to tell the difference between terror and tragedy, when 148 travelers who trusted the pilot and co-pilot to get them safely from here to there suddenly find themselves in the hands of…. Of whom? Of what?

In my darkest moments I am aware that we are always standing over the abyss of nothingness. Death. Extinction. But, once in awhile, something comes along to cheer me up. So far today it hasn’t.

“O God…, listen, not to our words, but to the groaning that cannot be uttered; harken, not to our petitions, but to the crying of our need.”

[W.E. Orchard, quoted in Harry Emerson Fosdick’s The Meaning of Prayer, p. 117-118, Association Press, 1915]

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, March 27, 2015.