November 12, 2024 - Good Morning! It’s Tuesday, November 12.
Twenty years ago, if there was a movie you wanted to see, and it wasn’t showing in a theater, what would you do? You’d go to Blockbuster! At that time, Blockbuster had 10,000 stores and 100,000 employees. Business was good and the future looked bright.
A few years before that, Read Hastings started a little business and named it Netflix. Instead of marketing video cassettes, like Blockbuster, it featured the brand new media product called DVDs. And instead of brick and mortar stores, Netflix had kiosks and a website. In 2001, Hastings met with the executives at Blockbuster and offered to sell them his business for 50 million dollars. They laughed him out of the office.
Today, Netflix has over 200 million subscribers, is worth more than 300 billion dollars, and is the largest media company in the world. Good luck finding a Blockbuster store, they closed the last one in 2014. That 50 million dollar deal looks pretty good . . . in hindsight.
Hindsight is a beautiful thing. With hindsight, everything becomes clear, makes sense, falls into place. As the old gospel song put it - “We’ll understand it better by and by”. The Apostle Paul, in I Corinthians 13, famously used the metaphor of a crude mirror - “Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face, now we know in part, but then we shall know even as we are known”.
How will we view our current era ten years from now? Twenty years? Will we understand it better? Will we be able to see more clearly what God was doing? I’m sure we will. That’s the beauty of hindsight. But today, without the advantage of hindsight, what are we left with?
Faith.
“This is the victory that overcomes the world - our faith.” I John 5:4
Meet you back here tomorrow,
David
cindertex50@yahoo.com
