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Imagine that every time you drive your car a quarter of a mile you have to rebuild its engine.
That’s the challenge of managing a Top Fuel dragster, those needle-nosed top-of-the-line acceleration machines.
Top Fuel dragsters aren’t built in dusty garages by tinkerers.
They are birthed by engineers and skilled technicians in immaculate assembly areas.
What impresses outsiders is not just the noise, the speed, and the inherent danger. It’s the numbers. Math is probably the only language capable of describing the sheer power of these fire-breathing monsters.
A Top Fuel dragster weighs 2,000 pounds. It generates 8,000 horsepower. It accelerates faster than any vehicle on Earth, generating 5 G’s and reaching 300 mph in about the same time your Chevy goes from zero to 30 mph.
A mere half-second after the lights on the “Christmas tree” turn green and the driver opens the throttle, the dragster has already traveled 21 feet and is going 74 mph. At the one-second mark, the speed has reached 113 mph.
At two seconds, the dragster (which is burning fuel at the rate of 95 gallons per minute) has traveled 250 feet and is going 213 mph.
In just less than four seconds, driver and car have gone 1000 feet and are traveling about 315 mph. That’s when the fuel is gone, parachutes are deployed, and the dragster slows to a stop. The mechanical stress during those four seconds is so extreme that most of the sparkplugs will have burned away.
During a typical weekend competition, a dragster will make up to eight runs, including qualifying and one-on-one races. Each run essentially destroys the engine and burns through $5,000 of fuel and parts. The crew, working hard, can rebuild the engine in about 40 minutes.
Those engines, at full throttle, are insanely loud – enough to inflict physical pain or even lifetime hearing impairment. Track announcers at Top Fuel events typically warn spectators to protect their ears, and a number of tracks even hand out ear plugs as a courtesy.
For sheer power, acceleration, and sonic impact, nothing holds a candle to a Top Fuel dragster.
But that’s nothing compared to the amazing power that you have right now.
You have the power to do something almost unimaginable: You can push God away. You can tell the Creator of the cosmos to bug off and stay out of your life.
Incredibly, he will comply.
We see this when Jesus journeys with his disciples to the Gentile side of the Sea of Galilee, to a place the Gospels identify as either the region of the Gerasenes or Gadarenes. There he is confronted by a man whose life is being systematically destroyed by indwelling demonic spirits.
If Hollywood screenwriters were inventing this story, Jesus and the demons would have a knockdown-dragout fight. Good would prevail over evil only after a monumental struggle.
But there is no fight. Jesus is the unchallenged master of both the seen and unseen worlds. The demons, from minute one, are powerless in his presence.
But perhaps they can land a telling blow. Maybe they can disrupt Jesus’ ministry. They ask permission to be sent into a herd of pigs feeding on a nearby hillside. The gospel of Mark tells us there are 2,000 swine. The demonized pigs promptly rush down the hillside and into the lake.
The shocking thing is that they all drown. Pigs are excellent swimmers. They are the Michael Phelps of barnyard animals.
By drowning the pigs, the demons have generated some serious havoc – an economic disaster for the people in this region.
These pigs represented the 401(k) of multiple herders. They were the “piggy bank” of a lot of people who didn’t yet know God. The upshot is that these people now associate Jesus not with good news but with a commodity collapse.
It’s just possible that the saddest verse in the Bible is Luke 8:37: “Then all the people of the region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear. So he got into the boat and left.”
Notice that Jesus doesn’t stick around and say, “Wait, I’m sure we can work something out.”
Nor does he try, at least in this story, to explain what’s at stake. He might have asked, “What’s it worth to you to have a relationship with someone who can cleanse a demonized man? Do you care more about your checkbooks than somebody having a shot at a new life?
“Are you willing to surrender the habits that are crippling your peace of mind? To stop pursuing the prestige you think will give your life meaning? To abandon your need to be in absolute control of the next 24 hours? To release the dreams you have for your children, the ones you’re hoping will validate your identity as good parents?”
Those questions ought to take our breath away.
But the people who have just had a first-person encounter with divine power are scared to death by what might happen next. They beg Jesus to leave.
Do you realize how much power you have? You have the power to make the Son of God go away.
All you have to do is ask.
Or you can do just the opposite. Like the demon-haunted man in this story, you have the power to respond to Jesus’ transforming touch by choosing to embrace a whole new way of life.
And that’s the kind of power that changes everything.