By Jim Denison
In the next five minutes while you’re reading this essay, 67 babies will be born in the United States. During that same time, 274 babies will be born in China, and 395 in India.
The global landscape is changing before our eyes. President Obama completed his visit to India last week by endorsing that country’s long-held demand for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Officials there welcomed the gesture but claimed that a broader partnership between our two countries is even more vital to their interests. One said, “India does need America, just as South Korea, Vietnam and Japan do. We’re all growing, but we’re growing in China’s shadow. Having the U.S. as the resident power in Asia is not that bad an option.”
Fareed Zakaria’s much-discussed treatise on the future is titled The Post-American World. He states that the Chinese economy has doubled in size every eight years for three decades. In 1978, China made 200 air conditioners; in 2005, it made 48 million. The 20 fastest-growing cities in the world are all in China. China is the world’s largest country, the fastest-growing major economy, the largest manufacturer, the second-largest consumer, the largest saver, and the second-largest military spender. Their economic rise has been the fastest in history.
When I was in Beijing last May, I was astounded by the economic optimism of the country. There are 4 million taxis in the city; spectacular growth extends in every direction. China and India together graduate six times more engineers each year than the United States does.
According to The New York Times’ Bob Herbert, our economy added 151,000 jobs last month, more than most economists expected. At that rate of job growth, however, it would take 15 to 20 years to get the employment rate back to where it was when the Great Recession began in December of 2007. The United States now ranks 12th among 36 developed nations for the percentage of young people with college degrees; we were once the global leader.
No nation’s global position is guaranteed. When I graduated from college, the Soviet Union was our permanent enemy and the Berlin Wall was a lasting symbol of the Cold War. Both have now been gone so long that my sons have no memory of them.
Name this country: world’s strongest military, economy and education system; currency the global standard; world center of technology and innovation. The answer is Great Britain, in 1900.
The chaotic unpredictability of our global experience can be unsettling at best. But Jesus is not surprised by anything you’ve read in this essay. Scripture says that “all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16-17). Consider some examples of his creative genius.
NASA has been in the news with the close encounter its Deep Impact spacecraft experienced with a comet known as Hartley 2. A comet’s vapor trail can be more than 10,000 miles long. But capture and bottle that “tail,” and you discover that the amount of vapor actually present in your bottle is less than one cubic inch of space.
Imagine traveling across the sky with that comet at the speed of light. You would fly for 13 billion years to reach the edges of the universe we can see through telescopes today. Yet the Bible says that God measures all of that with the palm of his hand (Is. 40:12). That’s the same hand holding you this moment (John 10:28).
President Theodore Roosevelt and his good friend, the naturalist William Beebe, would on occasion stay at Roosevelt’s family home. They would go out on its lawn at night. They would search the skies until they found the faint spot of light behind the lower left-hand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus. They would remember together the words:
That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda.
It is as large as our Milky Way.
It is one of a hundred million galaxies.
It consists of one hundred billion suns,
Each larger than our sun.
Then President Roosevelt would grin at Mr. Beebe and say, “Now I think we are small enough. Let’s go to bed.” Are we small enough to go to God?