Re-inviting The Clockmaker

Jesuit missionaries, like many foreigners, faced enormous challenges to contact the imperial court of China in the middle ages.

After several attempts, the persistence of the Jesuits paid off. They entered Peking and offered the Emperor amazing Western technological instruments including wind up clocks. 

To ensure that they were invited back to the court, the Jesuits hid the secret of how wind up clocks worked. When the time keeping devices stopped the Emperor invited them back. And the Jesuits gained greater access to the Chinese goverment.

Blaise Pascal, French physicist, philosopher, and mathematician wrote: “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator."

The heart is a wind-up clock that functions best when we remember to invite into our affairs the Master Clockmaker.