The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Psalm 19:1
Anyone who has ever looked at the stars on a dark night has, at times, been awe-struck by their vastness and the greatness of space, yet only twelve men in history have been privileged to stand on the moon and look back towards the blue planet, as Earth has been described. Standing on the surface of the moon, the Earth is some 229,000 plus miles away, and, according to Jim Irwin, one of those 12 who saw it from that perspective, the Earth appears to be the size of a walnut.
It takes a second and a half for light to reach us from the moon. And accordingly, astronomers refer to heavenly bodies as being light-years away. A light year is the distance light travels in 365 days at the speed of 186,282 miles per second.
Our closest star, Alpha Centauri, is 26,000,000,000 miles away. It's five times the size of the sun, and it takes 4.5 years for light to reach us from even the closest star.
Very quickly the vastness of God's creation begins to challenge our comprehension. It's just too great to fathom. How can the human mind handle all of this when we are accustomed to measuring distance in terms of miles or kilometers away from our home?
Imagine the thickness of a single sheet of paper and conceptualize that sheet of paper as representing the distance from the Earth to the sun, 93 million miles away. The distance to Alpha Centauri, the closest star, would be represented by the thickness of a stack of paper 71 feet high, or the height of a 7-storey building. The diameter of our galaxy alone would be a pile of paper 310 miles high. Again, that's based on the fact that the thickness of a single sheet of 20# paper would represent the distance between the Earth and the sun.
On several occasions, Jim Irwin, one of the U.S. astronauts, was our guest at Guidelines. Before I did a television interview with Jim, we had lunch with several friends at a nearby restaurant. While he was away from the table making a phone call, I told the waitress serving us who he was. About the time Jim went to the moon in 1972 she was a little girl in pigtails, and when Jim came back to the table, the waitress keep peering out of the corner of her eye, scrutinizing this man as someone from outer space.
But honestly, having experienced what Colonel James Irwin experienced separated him from the masses of humanity who stand on Earth and look up to the moon and the stars. One thing that impressed me about Jim is that his perspective of Earth as well as space and God was different from most people's. He'd been there! He saw it from a different perspective, and for him life would never be the same.
Robert Louis Stevenson, the poet, put it so beautifully when he wrote, "The stars shine over the mountains,/ The stars shine over the sea,/ The stars look up to the mighty God./ The stars look down on me./ The stars shall last for a million years,/ A million years and a day,/ But God and I will live and love/ When the stars have passed away."1
God is not "out there" somewhere. He is as close as your need, and He will reveal something of that personal care for you as you trust Him. He's the God who cares, as well as God, the Creator--which you can discover for yourself. Resource reading: Psalm 19:1-14
1 Robert Louis Stevenson, quoted in My Heart Sings (ed. Joan Winmill Brown) as quoted by Christianity Today, May 14, 1990, p. 32.
https://www.guidelines.org/devotional/god-is-as-close-as-your-need/
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