{"id":5344,"date":"2026-04-06T08:17:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T12:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5344"},"modified":"2026-04-06T08:17:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T12:17:25","slug":"doing-our-homework","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/06\/doing-our-homework\/","title":{"rendered":"Doing Our Homework"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,<\/em>\u00a0click here<\/a>
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Four minutes.<\/em>
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They were the four longest minutes of Stanislav Petrov\u2019s life.
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They also represented, arguably, the closest our world has ever come to nuclear catastrophe.
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On September 26, 1983, Petrov \u2013 a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces \u2013 was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early warning system.
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It was a particularly tense moment in the Cold War. Since the late 1940s, the United States and the Soviet Union had been locked in a struggle for global dominance. President Ronald Reagan had recently declared that the USSR represented an \u201cempire of evil.\u201d
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On September 1, a Soviet fighter intercepted Korean Airlines flight 007, which had accidentally strayed into Russian airspace. Fearing that the 747 was spying on behalf of the American government, the fighter shot it down, taking the lives of all 269 passengers and crew.
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Historians now know that in the fall of 1983, military leaders on both sides of the ideological divide were on hair trigger alert. Perceived provocations were taken very seriously.
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It was at this moment that Stanislav Petrov\u2019s computer screen suddenly glowed with the images of five incoming American ballistic missiles.
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Petrov was a military officer. Military protocols were unambiguous. If and when the Soviet early warning system signaled an attack, the duty officer had to pick up a red phone and alert his superiors. They would then initiate further contacts up the chain of command until the highest-ranking decision-makers either took no action or authorized a retaliatory nuclear strike.
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It was assumed that the entire process had to be completed in about 10 minutes. Otherwise, it might be too late. The enemy\u2019s ICBMs could compromise one\u2019s capacity to respond.
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America\u2019s early warning system was founded on similar assumptions. Speed was essential. Cold War strategizing had evolved into the doctrine of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) \u2013 a wonderfully ironic acronym if there ever was one. Each side knew that if the other side had time to respond, neither side would emerge unscathed. Everything and everybody would be nuked.
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Quick responses were urgent. No provision was made for agents to pause and ask, \u201cIs it possible that something else is happening here? Maybe we should step back for a few minutes.\u201d
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Both sides knew they needed early warning systems that would never fail<\/em> and personnel who would never hesitate<\/em> \u2013 two significant acts of faith. It\u2019s not an exaggeration to say that the fate of humanity hung in the balance.
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Petrov took note of the images of the five incoming nukes.
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He sat at his console. He did not reach for the red phone.
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The pressure to act was overwhelming. His comrades in the Oko early warning center were watching him. Was he or was he not going to alert his superiors to this crisis? Petrov was risking his career. His life. In a real sense, he was risking all their lives and the lives of countless Soviet citizens.
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Four agonizing minutes went by.
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Petrov finally picked up a phone. But it wasn\u2019t the red one. He reported the data on his screen to a trusted superior, along with his suspicion that there was, in fact, no nuclear threat. \u201cAre you certain?\u201d asked the supervisor. \u201cNo, I am not certain,\u201d he admitted.
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But within a few minutes it was clear that he was right.
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Radar revealed no incoming ICBMs. A later inquiry determined that sunlight bouncing off high-altitude clouds above North Dakota had triggered false images in the Soviet satellites\u2019 detection system.
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The world went to bed that night not knowing that World War III had been averted. Historians agree that if Petrov had obediently dialed his superiors on the red phone, there was a genuine possibility they would have authorized a nuclear counterstrike.
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None of these details were known until 1998, long after the USSR had collapsed and Soviet officials felt free to write their memoirs.
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What had happened to Stanislav Petrov? He had been quietly kept from public view, then compelled to take early retirement. After all, he had revealed that the Soviet early warning system was seriously flawed \u2013 a major embarrassment to the military brass. \u00a0
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The rest of the world gradually realized that Petrov was a hero. Before his death in 2017 at the age of 77, he received multiple World Citizen Awards and was honored by the United Nations. A documentary on his life was called The Man Who Saved the World<\/em>.
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For his part, Petrov humbly thought he had merely done his job.
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Which raises the question: What led him to think that what he was seeing was a false alarm?
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Petrov had done his homework.
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For years, he had studied the early warning system. Specifically, he had quietly become an expert in anomalies \u2013 recognizing conditions that weren\u2019t what they appeared to be. On that September night in 1983, his trained intuition told him not to nudge humanity closer to nuclear holocaust.
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Followers of Jesus need to do their homework, too.
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Are you yearning to grow in spiritual wisdom and to hone your intuition concerning God\u2019s direction for your life?
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Don\u2019t settle for secondhand ideas. Commit yourself to diving into God\u2019s Word.
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You don’t have to read the entire Bible to be transformed by what you find there.\u00a0But where’s a good place to\u00a0start?

With Lent and Easter in the rear-view mirror, this might be a great time to read or reread the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.\u00a0Together that’s\u00a089 chapters.\u00a0If you read a chapter a day, beginning today, you’ll finish on the Fourth of July, having experienced for yourself the four biographies of Jesus that Christians have pondered now for twenty centuries.

When Jesus said that the truth will set us free (John 8:32), he seems to have had\u00a0something specific in mind.

The freedom to understand and respond as he would have us respond to our own circumstances \u2013 to spot with greater discernment the \u201cfalse alarms\u201d that sometimes come our way \u2013 such freedom can become ours only when we decide to read, ponder, debate, chew on, and dare to apply Scripture to our lives.

Such wisdom doesn\u2019t come overnight. But it will come<\/em> if we choose to become lifelong learners of God\u2019s Word.
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We may not save the world.
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But we just might save a few other things \u2013 including the depth of our own lives with God and with others.

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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0Four minutes.\u00a0They were the four longest minutes of Stanislav Petrov\u2019s life.\u00a0They also represented, arguably, the closest our world has ever come to nuclear catastrophe.\u00a0On September 26, 1983, Petrov \u2013 a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces \u2013 was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5345,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[100],"class_list":["post-5344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bible-study"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5346,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344\/revisions\/5346"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}