Months ago (it seems like years now, doesn’t it?) when Ben Carson announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President, the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists released the following statement: “While individual church members are free to support or oppose any candidate for office as they see fit, it is crucial that the Church as an institution remain neutral on all candidates for office. Care should be taken that the pulpit and all church property remain a neutral space when it comes to elections.

Now the country’s boisterously divided—not only between political parties and candidates this presidential election season—but water cooler conversations reveal a nation divided as well over the videotaped encounter of a 17-year-old male lowland gorilla and a three-year-old boy. By now you’ve heard the story retold a hundred times (make that 101 now). An unidentified boy with his mother and a group of children were visiting the Cincinnati Zoo last week, when the youngster pulled away from his mother, climbed into the gorilla enclosure, slipped on the edge and fell ten feet into the moat.

I'm sitting here in my 26th floor hotel room in Hong Kong—high rises towering into the sky all around me. I don't think I will ever forget the anguished, nearly despairing look on her face last Friday afternoon—a desperate face not even my iPhone camera could possibly have captured.

On April 29, 1865, 50,000 people stood in line to pass through the Ohio Statehouse rotunda to pay their last respects to the recently slain Abraham Lincoln. As America mourned the assassination of its President, Ohioans reflected the gratitude of this country in that outpouring of affection. Hanging overhead in the Statehouse was a banner with an excerpt from Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Never mind that the Alpha Centauri star system is 4.367 lights years away—some of the world’s richest and brightest minds have announced a new collaboration to get there. From here!

Look—I don’t mean to sound incredulous and I’m not wanting to be cynical. But when I learned just this week that an organization called “UnitedCry” is planning to hold a prayer rally for 30,000 pastors this Saturday (April 9) in front of the Lincoln Memorial in the nation’s capital, I admit to being a bit skeptical. It’s not that I don’t believe pastors pray. I joined 5000 other praying pastors last summer in Austin, Texas, at a convention they called “Called.” Pastors pray—trust me.

One of our team came hurrying in to breakfast two Tuesdays ago with the news. Thirty-one of us from the seminary at Andrews were wrapping up our evangelistic mission to Santiago de Cuba. We’d just spent our only night (and the last one) in Cuba in a hotel (a change from the generous kindness extended to us by the Cuban families who boarded all of us in their small living quarters during our mission). Lisandro had been watching the news in his hotel room and hurried in with the announcement, “There’s been a terrorist bombing in Belgium at the Brussels airport!”

I'm squeezed into the very last window seat on this American Airlines jet, ready to taxi away from the Frank Pais Holguin international airport in Cuba on our flight back to Miami, Chicago, and home. The lady beside can't speak a word of English, and after ten days in Cuba my Espanol has only increased by a dozen formal you-can-say-this-from-the-pulpit sentences.

Humans have been fascinated for millennia with the thought that there are other intelligent alien life forms in our universe. Most recently from the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project decades ago to the $100 million ten year Breakthrough Listen Initiative today, science continues to act on this numinous sense that “somewhere out there” are intelligent creatures with whom we might yet communicate.