The Seven Minutes of Trust

When NASA's Perseverance rover approached Mars in February 2021, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory faced a moment they called "seven minutes of terror." The rover had to descend through the Martian atmosphere, deploy a supersonic parachute, fire retro-rockets, and lower itself on cables to the surface — all autonomously. Because radio signals take over eleven minutes to travel from Mars to Earth, every command had already been sent. The engineers could not steer, could not correct, could not intervene. They could only wait and trust the systems they had spent years building.

For seven agonizing minutes, some of the most brilliant minds on the planet sat in a room with their hands in their laps, watching screens, unable to do a single thing to help.

Faith often feels like that. We prepare, we pray, we study the Word, we seek wise counsel — and then comes the moment when we must release our grip. The diagnosis comes back. The prodigal leaves home. The business closes. And we discover that faith is not the absence of fear but the decision to trust the One whose hands are never in His lap.

The writer of Hebrews understood this: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." The God who holds the galaxies in orbit does not lose signal. He is never eleven minutes away. And He has never once failed to stick the landing.