ONBOARD LASER DIAGNOSTIC CHECK
Last month, for the first time, a privately owned company (as opposed to a government-funded agency) successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon. The unmanned lander, Odysseus, built and operated by Intuitive Machines, made a soft landing on the lunar surface, but it was almost a disaster. The flight operators who were working on a separate issue decided to check the craft’s distance from the moon the night before the scheduled landing. When they tried to fire the laser rangefinders on board, nothing happened. These lasers were critical to help the craft land safely. Normally, the team wouldn’t have discovered this internal failure until they were already committed to landing, but thanks to this unrelated problem, they had an early warning. They delayed the landing long enough for engineers to come up with a brilliant solution, which they programmed and uploaded to the lander. And it worked.

INTERNAL SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSTIC CHECK
In today’s passage, Paul is warning the Christians in Corinth that he is about to visit them for a third time, and he’s concerned that this will be their third strike. They have worked to correct their previous acceptance of someone’s egregious sin, but he wonders if they’ve really put aside sexual immorality (see 2 Cor. 12:20–21). He asks them to do an internal check to be sure they’re reflecting Christ in their actions.

Questions

• What is your reaction to sending spacecraft—eventually, humans—back to the moon?
• When s a time that you wondered whether a machine or your health was working as it should?
• How can we examine ourselves to see if we are faithful in our behavior?