Thought for the Day: New Year's Day

I'm having a hard time with the first letter of John and the first chapter of the Gospel of John. So first a New Year's thought.

I always like to think on New Year's Day that what we're celebrating is the fact that our earth has made another 940,000,000 km trip around the sun. A quick check of various websites shows that the earth has made the trip 4.5 or 4.6 billion times. So now it's 4.5 billion or 4.6 billion +1 trips on New Year's Day.

I've tried to look for a nice animation of this trip but can't seem to find any. All the animations seem to show the full cycle in 12 seconds or less (most are for educational purposes. kids have short attention spans). I wish there were an animation showing the earth moving around the sun slowly.

But then again, the other fascinating thing about this movement is that we're actually hurtling through space at 107,300 kilometers an hour! This only serves to emphasize the fact that while it takes a year to get around, the distance covered is pretty massive.

As Bishop Oscar Romero said (and here I remove the quote from the context), "It helps, once in a while, to take the long view". 4.5-4.6 billion years. Hurtling through space at 107,300 kilometers an hour. 940 million kilometers traveled. That's certainly one way of looking at things.