Daily Prayer, 31 July

One of the things that we take aboard when we resupply at sea is our mail. After our replacement parts, food, and supplies land on deck we begin receiving first the official correspondence, and then the personal mail. You have never seen in your life the amount of Amazon logoed boxes as a deployed ship at sea receives at once. It’s an astonishing change from my days as an enlisted Sailor, that I can log onto the internet and order new earbuds that will find me aboard my ship in the Arabian sea a mere two-three weeks later. Since, were it not for Amazon, most young Sailors don’t much use the postal system, I took the opportunity a day or so after getting mail to read the following prayer. I learned something while writing it, and hope you will too upon reading it.

On July 1^st, 1963, the US Postal Service introduced a new plan for the sorting and delivery of mail to make it quicker and more efficient. The plan improved the zone scheme used at the time, which added a two-digit number to the address coinciding with the sorting center closest to the recipient. The system wasn’t all that helpful, but using even more digits was impracticable because of the length it would add to the last line of the address.

Postal Inspector Robert Moon came up with a solution. He standardized state abbreviations to two letters each—ones we still use—and came up with a new five-digit code. The first digit would be one of the 10 regions in the U.S., starting in the east (because, of course, you’d start with the best coast), New England is 0, New York/Pennsylvania is 1, Mid-Atlantic 2, and so on until the west coast, which is 9. The next two digits represent the Sectional Control Facility that would largely use the same two digits as the old code, and the last two digits would be the local post office where final sorting and delivery are handled. This was Inspector Moon’s Zone Improvement Code, what we now call the ZIP code, an acronym intentionally chosen to sound fast.

The nice thing about the ZIP code is that even if every other piece of data on the envelope becomes illegible, so long as the recipient’s name and the ZIP code can be read, then his mail will find him. Or, more likely these days, his Amazon package will find him. The ZIP code tells the USPS where the package is going.

The key to arriving at any destination is having one, you have to know where you are going. Yogi Berra once said “if you don’t know where you’re going you will end up someplace else.” And the someplace else may be someplace you don’t want to be. We all should take a moment on a regular basis to reflect on where we are and where we’d like to go. Only then can we figure out how to get there, set achievable goals and make concrete plans. We wouldn’t dream of leaving the ZIP code off of our Amazon packages, we should be no less careful with our destination in life.

LET US PRAY

Lord God, most of the time our daily tasks and struggles keep us too busy to consider our plans for tomorrow, next week, or beyond. In the brief moments that we do have, we pray You would help us to see the road that we should walk. Help us to discern our purpose in life so that we may strive to fulfill it here and now as best we can, and then plan to move forward and fulfill our best purpose in the future. We were all created by Your loving hand, and so each of us is imbued with infinite worth and are called to a particular task and purpose. Help us to find it and fulfill it, for You are the God of wisdom and strength, and to You we give glory, honor, and worship, now and forever and to the ages of ages.

AMEN