Star-gazing

We've been doing a lot of staring up into the night sky lately. It leaves our necks kinda kinked, but our minds blown.

Us humans tend to look up and see little white dots on the night sky (sometimes very few of them thanks to the artificial night-lights we're surrounded by), giving them just a passing glance. But look up at night and let your eyes "expand" a little. Consider that what you're seeing is something so much bigger than yourself that it's almost unimaginable.

The light that reaches you from a distant star may have taken a very, very long time to get here - even though light travels incredibly fast. Just ponder for a moment what that distance is like. Can you even imagine it?

Now see if you can spot a satellite. It looks like a star, but it's so close compared to a planet that it's really just within touch-reach. Imagine that piece of man-made stuff up there, circling the earth, bound to it by an invisible force that keeps us stuck to the planet's surface, upside down or right-side-up. It's powered by invisible rays from our closest star - incredible!

Find some binoculars, or better yet a home-size telescope. Aim it at a "fuzzy" star and watch a galaxy or a million other stars spring into focus. All of them so far away that you would take a life-time or more to reach them if you could travel that far.

Now think about all those National Geographic articles on the universe. The galaxies strung out like islands in a pitch-black sea - without end. Consider the images that the Hubble telescope has sent home - colours and light beyond imagination from places beyond our sight.

Think about how all these fit together, spinning in delicate dances and ordered orbits.

Ponder black holes, and dying stars, and blue giants, and all the other amazing things out there. How little we truly know of them, how arrogant we are to think we're the centre of the universe on our little speck of dust circling a tiny star.

It's both humbling and exhilarating to realize how vast space is, how much is out there, and how great a God has made it all.

What the heck do we know...us mere mortals. Why should our world, above all others, be the place where sin and salvation take place? What makes us think we're so special?

And yet we are. As minute and insignificant as we are in the vastness of the universe (or multiverse, according to new research), each of us is precious, unique, loved beyond measure.

Awesome. Unbelieveable. Mind-blowing.