I expect you have many times been out on a clear, dark night, and as you have walked along you have looked up at the stars. Perhaps as you have been looking up you have seen a bright star run along the sky and then disappear. Do you know what it was? “Yes!” I think I can hear some bright boy answer; “It was a shooting star.” Quite right, but what is a shooting star?
Perhaps I had better try and explain. All stars, like our earth, have an orbit of their own in which they move. Sometimes, for reasons which we do not know, some of these stars get out of their path. As they wander round in space they get into the track of our earth, and are attracted toward her by the force of gravitation. The speed with which they travel is so tremendous that as they touch the atmosphere which surrounds our earth they are set on fire. The bright object which we see traveling across the sky is this blazing star falling to the earth.
Usually they are all burnt up, but I have a few pieces of brown looking stone, which are the remains of some of these shooting stars. The terrific force with which they struck the earth had carried them down through the soil, until their progress was stopped by the hard rock beneath.
In the Epistle to Jude we read of “wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.”
Now that is just like some boys and girls, and grown-up people too. God intended them to be like stars, and lead bright, happy, useful lives for Him; but instead of that, they have got out of God’s way, into the ways of sin.
Unlike the stars, we have to choose our way for ourselves, but we must choose, we cannot drift. If we are not in God’s way, then we are out of our course, like a wandering star. May God help each one who reads this to choose the way of life.
ML 01/09/1938