The Continuing Story

There’s a small silver lining in the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina: At an awful cost, humanity is learning some lessons. History strongly suggests that, by putting these and countless other lessons to use, however imperfectly, we make a contribution to a better world, just as our predecessors did and our successors will do.

It makes you stop and think. In the development of the universe over the past 13-plus billion years, we've been given some marvelous abilities:

• to observe;
  
• to communicate;
  
• to care about others;
  
• to decide that the world ought to be different;
  
• to act, singly and in concert;
  
• to learn from experience, both ours and that of others;
  
• to change our ways and our world — that is, to adapt;
  
• to keep going.

We all exercise these abilities, in varying degrees at various times. When we do, we play a tiny role — often an indirect one, and sometimes badly and at great cost — in the story of the continuing creation of the universe.

[via The Questioning Christian]