The Signal From Home

In February 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover landed on Mars and began receiving instructions from mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Every command travels roughly 130 million miles, arriving after a delay of up to twenty-two minutes. The rover cannot phone home for clarification. It cannot argue with the route. It receives the instruction and follows it, trusting that the engineers back on Earth have access to orbital imagery, terrain maps, and data the rover itself will never see.

Here is what strikes me. Perseverance has cameras. It has sensors. It can see its immediate surroundings quite well. And sometimes the path mission control chooses looks wrong from ground level — a route straight toward a rocky outcrop, a detour that seems to lead nowhere. But the engineers see what the rover cannot. They see the cliff hidden just beyond the ridge. They see the sand trap that looks like solid ground.

Obedience works the same way in the life of faith. God issues instructions that sometimes make no sense from where we stand. Forgive the person who hurt you. Give when your account is low. Wait when every instinct says move. We see five feet ahead. The Almighty sees the whole terrain.

Obedience is not the absence of intelligence. Perseverance is one of the most sophisticated machines ever built, and its greatest asset is its willingness to follow a signal from home. So is yours. Trust the Engineer who sees what you cannot.