Hi, welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host for the daily challenges.  This week’s topic is part of our series called God Is… where we’re trying to learn about God’s character and nature through some key stories in the Bible.

Our daily challenges are meant to help you explore what it means to follow Jesus, even if you don’t have a lot of time. We have a rhythm that keeps us in sync, even if we’re not a community that meets together in person regularly. Every Monday we introduce the week’s idea. Every Tuesday we study it in the Bible. Every Wednesday we see how that challenges and transforms our thinking on the topic. Thursdays we try to apply and live it out. Friday is a day for prayer and reflection before we take a rest on Saturday, and Sundays we meet together with others in community.

Have you seen, or read the Martian?  I’m looking forward to seeing the film, having read the book at a friend’s recommendation a few months ago.  It tells the story of an astronaut who nearly dies on Mars, but actually survives, only to learn the rest of his crew evacuated during the emergency that injured him.  He basically MacGyvers his way through survival on a planet far from home, with nowhere near enough supplies to live long enough for a crew to rescue him.  It’s described as Real Life Science Fiction, since it tries not to imagine anything that isn’t technically feasible in the near future.

It was exciting to read, but also nerve-wracking, as disaster after disaster threatened the astronaut’s life.  The author, Andy Weir, said this was exactly what he wanted to do to his readers.  “I was sitting around thinking about how a manned mission to Mars could actually work using today’s technology. Then I started thinking about all the things that could go wrong…So I created an unfortunate protagonist and subjected him to all of it.”

He basically showed us what happens when everything we rely upon fails.  I felt like that happened in the last year – almost everything we owned turned 10 years old, and started to fail.  It’s a frustrating experience, even if it wasn’t as threatening as disaster on Mars!

Question: Have you ever experienced a “disaster” when something you depended on broke down or went wrong? How did you respond? In what ways is this similar to experiencing a broken promise?

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