EVENT HORIZON

There’s places in our universe you don’t want to go.

There’s places where worlds are being born. From a distance, the dance of creation is a wonder to behold. But up close up, you run into dense clouds of rock. Some rocks are the size of a B-B, others the size of mountains and even whole planets. All of them are moving at tens of thousands of miles and hour. Going into these clouds of debris would turn an Iowa Class Battleship into junk within minutes.

Then there’s powerful jets of energy erupting from the center of many galaxies. Anything in the way would be vaporized. They’re so powerful that galaxies millions of light years can be impacted.

Then there’s these bizarre places where you definitely don’t want to go. I’m sure they’re well marked on the charts of any alien starjammer, but if I were making the charts, I’d have an old time sailing ship sailing off the edge of the world and the words “Stars End,” in old world type.

We call these places Black Holes.

They come in all sizes. Some are monsters that lurk in the middle of galaxies. We have one called Sagittarius A and the stars, worlds, rocks, and nebula in our Galaxy spiral around it.

Then there’s others scattered throughout the universe. Some of these black holes are tiny compared to the monster in the middle of our Galaxy, They come in all sizes ranging from the size of our solar system all the way down to atom sized (or so we think). All have one thing in common. Immense gravity. We’re talking gravity so intense that if a starship were unfortunate to pass a certain point, it would be gone forever. We call this point, the Event Horizon. Essentially it’s the point of no return. Fall past it, and like the sailing ship I’d use to mark it, you sail off the edge of forever.

It was with a simple comment using the word “Event Horizon” that my third novel took a turn.

At a homicide scene, RJ, Will Diaz’s buddy and partner in crime says, “Look like Max crossed one of your event horizons.” I had to stop and reread the line. I realized that the characters had taken control of the story. I’d been looking for the Christian view tie-in, and by invoking the name of a place you don’t want to go, I found it.

It changed the title of the novel and concentrated on “Event Horizons” in people’s lives.

Another character in the story says it best. “You take a pistol and you point it at someone. You pull the trigger. When that hammer falls, you better hope the bullet is a dud or you’re a lousy shot because once it fires, there is no calling the bullet back. You just crossed a point from which there is no return.”

His point is that an Event Horizon in life is anything where life is never the same again. Once it’s crossed, you can’t go back.

Oftentimes, these are events of our own making. In the book, we’ll see several.

We cross event horizons in our lives every day. We make dozens of decisions or have things happen to us or around us with little thought or clue to how they might impact us or others.

The above sentence was where this post was supposed to end. But something kept nagging at me . I was about to chalk it up to simple writer’s block (something I put right up there with ghosts and UFOs. I don’t believe in it). But then I realized the problem here was simpler than that.

It wasn’t finished.

I’ve came to know that there is an Event Horizon we can cross, and not even know it’s there. It’s what happens in the three pounds of gray matter between our ears, and since we control it, we can do something about it.

Falling past that Event Horizon is easy. Maybe we arrived at it because we were raised that way. Maybe it’s because we listen to the wrong people. Maybe it’s because we accepted someone’s thoughts as or own.

Unlike the Event Horizons we run into in life, we can escape this one. It’s one of the few Event Horizons we can escape from because we built it. And because we built it, it can become a trap worse than anything we find in space. And here’s why. A black hole destroys because that’s what it does. it’s not a living, conscious force.

We however, destroy out of our thoughts, and that something we can change.

It occurred to me while reading Max Lucado’s “Anxious for Nothing.” Max quotes often from letters written by Paul, specifically the one from Philippians 4:8 that goes ” FIX YOUR THOUGHTS ON WHAT IS TRUE, AND HONORABLE, AND RIGHT, AND PURE, AND LOVELY , AND ADMIRABLE.”

It got me thinking, and while the verse can cover a lot of different things, ranging from how we spend our time to most anything you can mention, and it should apply to anything that isn’t from God. The Bible and our own experiences should have taught us that God is above all, a God of love. Hate isn’t from him. So if we find ourselves hating anyone, according to what Paul wrote, maybe we need to stop and ask “Why?’

What is it we’re hating?

Hate isn’t from God, but it does serve one useful function. It makes a good mirror for us to look at ourselves in.

And if we find ourselves looking in that mirror of hate, maybe we need to ask ourselves why we’re doing the looking.

Only then can we dare to cross out of the trap we’re in and move on.