{"id":5601,"date":"2026-07-24T08:26:35","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T12:26:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5601"},"modified":"2026-07-24T08:26:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T12:26:35","slug":"history-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/24\/history-lessons\/","title":{"rendered":"History Lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>


All swans are white.\u00a0

At least, that’s what Europeans thought for hundreds of years.

“As rare as a black swan” became something of a proverb.\u00a0It meant the odds were exceedingly low you would ever\u00a0see or experience something.

When Europeans arrived in Australia, however, they discovered there was a species of black swans after all.

In his bestselling 2007 book The Black Swan<\/em>, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes the case that the world in which we live has been largely shaped by the sudden appearance of discoveries, events, and breakthroughs that no one saw coming.\u00a0

“Black swans”\u00a0have far-reaching impact.\u00a0And even though revisionist historians may look back and say, “Oh, we actually knew that was going to happen,” Taleb asserts that the surprise — or, more likely, the shock — is always quite genuine.

Think about any book written in 1975 that tried to predict what the world would be like in the first quarter of the 21st century.\u00a0

No prophet foresaw the black swans that would change everything:\u00a0the revolution of the personal computer, the arrival of the internet, the sudden fall of the Soviet Union, the discovery of dark energy in the cosmos, the rise of MAGA, the ubiquity of Smart Phones, and the election of a reality TV personality to two presidential terms.

People in the prediction business don’t exactly have it easy.\u00a0

Professional prognosticators, starting with the present moment, tend to\u00a0draw lines\u00a0of some sort into the future.\u00a0Such lines\u00a0may trend up or down.\u00a0But they\u00a0always assume\u00a0that something<\/em> of the present moment is going to stay the same.\u00a0That’s the problem with black swans.\u00a0Unexpected developments in\u00a0technology, science, or economics may suddenly put everyone back to zero.\u00a0

Taleb says he has been asked on several occasions, “Tell us what you think the next 10 black swans might be.”\u00a0

He has to coach himself not to laugh out loud.\u00a0By definition, a black swan cannot be predicted. It cannot be foreseen.\u00a0Even though we don’t want our world to be turned upside-down and inside-out, it happens all the time.\u00a0

And it will happen again.

A few days before his trial and crucifixion, Jesus told his disciples that a black swan was coming.\u00a0It was going to change all of their tomorrows.

The citizens of Judea were fiercely proud of their temple.\u00a0It was on a par with many of the spectacular construction projects that dotted the Roman Empire.\u00a0For faithful Jews, the temple was the center of the universe.\u00a0It was where heaven and earth came together \u2013 where God met with his people.\u00a0And it was all going to come crashing down.

“Not one stone will be left upon another,” Jesus said.\u00a0His prediction came true 40 years later, in A.D. 70, when a Roman army, exasperated with Jewish resistance, sacked and burned Jerusalem.\u00a0The gold that adorned the temple melted into the seams between its giant blocks.\u00a0The soldiers pried the stones apart in an effort to scavenge it.

The disciples were shocked.\u00a0In Matthew 24:3 they ask when all this going is to happen.\u00a0And then, raising\u00a0a much more spectacular issue:\u00a0“What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Jesus’ lengthy answer, which can be found in three parallel Bible chapters\u00a0(Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21), has yielded\u00a020 centuries of End Times speculation.\u00a0At any given moment in church history, “prophecy experts” have been certain they have cracked the code of the timing of the Apocalypse.

In 1987, I received a small book that I still keep on my shelf:\u00a088 Reasons Why the Rapture<\/em>Will Occur in 1988<\/em>.\u00a0The word “rapture” is associated with the gathering of God’s people to himself during the last times.\u00a0The next year the same author wrote another book:\u00a089<\/em>Reasons Why the Rapture Will Occur in 1989<\/em>.\u00a0To my knowledge, the author hasn’t written any sequels lately.

A great deal of time, effort, and countless trees can be saved if followers of Jesus simply take him at his word in Matthew 24:36: “But about that day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”\u00a0From the get-go, all of our speculation about timetables is in vain.\u00a0

So where does that leave us?\u00a0Jesus tells his\u00a0followers to stay alert,\u00a0and to refuse to shift into spiritual autopilot.\u00a0

Interestingly, that’s similar to the counsel that Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers at the end of The Black Swan<\/em>.\u00a0He challenges us\u00a0to keep our eyes open for the unexpected ways in which history is always changing.

We don’t know God’s timetable for the future.\u00a0We can’t predict what black swans are about to change everything.

But we can know who’s in charge of history, and that giving\u00a0God\u00a0our fullest attention is always the right move.

Nothing, after all, is ever going to surprise him<\/em>.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here All swans are white.\u00a0 At least, that’s what Europeans thought for hundreds of years. “As rare as a black swan” became something of a proverb.\u00a0It meant the odds were exceedingly low you would ever\u00a0see or experience something. When Europeans arrived in Australia, however, they discovered there was a species of black… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[62,417,3,1154],"class_list":["post-5601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-change","tag-end-times","tag-history","tag-prophecies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5601","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=5601"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5603,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5601\/revisions\/5603"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}