Consider the Panama Canal—a modern marvel. It took 75,000 workers 12 years to dig 10 miles to create the Panama Canal, the water gates that join the Atlantic and the Pacific.    Although the locks are a generous 110 feet wide, the largest of the vessels that pass through, called Panamax, have just one foot to spare on either side!  So there are plans for expansion underway.   Good thing, because every year, between 12,000 and 15,000 ships go through the Panama Canal!

But here's the stat that blows my mind.  A boat traveling from New York to San Francisco that travels through the Canal saves a staggering 7,872 miles (nearly one third of the circumference of the entire globe!).    

Creating this convenience has come at a price.   When the canal opened in 1914, it did so at a cost of 375 million dollars (that's 8.9 billion in today's money).  At the time, it was the single most expensive construction project in U.S. History.  And it was also extremely costly in terms of human life—with more than 5,600 workers perishing from disease or accident.   That's more than one death every day for more than a decade!

Allow me to grab the rudder of this little blog and steer the ship into a hard turn. 

Consider the extraordinary price that Jesus paid when He came to earth.   Like the land mass that separated the Atlantic from the Pacific, our sin stood between us and God—“uncrossable.”

In choosing to die a horrific death in our place, Jesus made possible the ultimate passage: from earth to heaven…from death to life.   But perhaps like the Panama Canal, the story has grown so familiar, we've lost our sense of awe.  Time to get it back.

Grace—the kind that bids us cross from death to life—is inexplicably costly.