“Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth” (2 Peter 1:12 KJV).
How could anybody forget that the earth is round?
I had been reading a book about a woman who skied across Antarctica, so I traced her route on a map. I told my husband, “She skied north to the South Pole.”
“You can’t ski north to the South Pole,” he informed me.
“But she DID ski north to the South Pole,” I insisted. As we lay in bed that night, we discussed the issue for a few frustrating minutes, my ignorance darker than the dimly lit room.
“Whatever you do, don’t become a navigator,” he said, grinning. “Everyone would get lost.” He was ready to drop the discussion, but I wanted to understand how I could be wrong. I mean, the map clearly showed that the woman had skied north.
“The earth is round like a basketball,” he finally pointed out. “So when you travel to the bottom of the ball, you can only go south.”
“Oh,” I said, burying my face in a pillow. I had known that, of course, and yet I apparently needed a reminder. I had been focusing on a flat map, forgetting that the earth is round.
We can so easily forget what we know; that is one reason we regularly read the Bible and listen to preaching. We want to learn new things, but we also want to have our memory refreshed. We must remember what we know.
Christine Laws is a freelance writer and editor living in Amity. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in a variety of publications. She is also the author of “Fresh and Fruitful: Cultivating the Art of Writing,” available atwww.clp.org.
