Jupiter

The reader should be compelled with immediacy and fecundity to desist every present action and give gratitude to the Lord of heaven and earth for the existence of Jupiter. I will proceed to explain why in a only a few moments, but please accept my proposition with faith and proceed to implement it presently. Notice, I did not say stop and simply give thanks. Many people give thanks to that which they know not - an unknown god, or to the spirit of the fish that fed them, like many Native American tribes - but are compelled by their humanity and mortality as well as their finitude to give thanks to something, anything, beyond their existence. Secondly, give thanks for Jupiter, that is, the fifth planet from the sun, not the false Roman deity it happens to be named after. Third, give thanks to the Lord of heaven and earth, for not only can you see into the second heaven at night (the first being the atmosphere, the second being space, and the third heaven that which the Apostle Paul described as visiting, the unseen spiritual realm) you can, indeed, see Jupiter, one of the brightest heavenly bodies in the night sky. Now, in regards to the reasoning of why we should give thanks for the gas giant, I will be brief. Have you ever had your house, field, place of business, road you were traveling on, or any other locality in which you regular find yourself pummeled to smithereens by a rogue asteroid? There are a very select few who could answer in the affirmative on this proposition. But the fact that the vast majority of us can robustly answer in the negative, and with gratitude mind you, is largely due to our cosmic neighbor, Jupiter. You see, just as some big personalities like to metaphorically suck up all the oxygen in a room, big gaseous planets like to suck up all the cosmic dust and asteroids in the solar system, and gravity alone explains this. Beyond merely being in the habitable zone of your star in your solar system, for a planet to be conducive to a variety of life, or even life at all, it likely needs a big neighbor to sweep up all of the meteors that would otherwise like to become meteorites and meteoroids in the absence of a large gravitational force nearby to pull them away, like a large benevolent vacuum cleaner on the cosmic scale! Dear Lord, thank you for Jupiter.