His Abundant Gifts of Love

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…
then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light…”
Genesis 1:1,3

            And thus we were given the universe.

            It’s beyond our comprehension. I think this is divine intervention. It’s kind of surprising to me that He allowed us, with our tiny, little minds, to visibly see and comprehend as much of it as we do.

            Just think about it. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second—if it were to bend around our Mother Earth, about 7 ¾ times in that second. All of those beautiful twinkling stars (just like our own sun) you see on a clear night are many, many light years away. Most of them are in our own Milky Way galaxy.

            Now a light year is the distance light travels in a year at the rate of 186,282 miles per second. Some of those twinkling objects we see in the night sky are actually other galaxies, each with their own several million suns. There are even photos of bright clusters of “objects” taken with the Hubbell Telescope that actually show hundreds or thousands of galaxies in a sky-space the size of a BB to our naked, stargazing eyes as seen from our little planet. In view of these things, it baffles me that there are some who dismiss the idea of a more powerful entity, beyond our comprehension. There are certainly other dimensions we are not privy to. Divine intervention again. You will not find the center or the edge of our universe.  Nor will you know of its beginning or its end. Maybe our universe is one of an infinite number of universes. Who knows? I, for one, will just thank Him for the celestial gifts He placed within our view and within our mental grasp. Our particular sun heats and cools our wonderful planet just right. I would bet He’s given clusters of orbiting planets to the other suns in the sky, and I’d bet each sun has at least one, maybe more, with living creatures and their own style of “humans”…maybe just like us.

            Clear, starlit nights are special. And if we are lucky enough to see a meteor or a comet, they’re even better. Like listening to the bubbling, gurgling brook, gazing into the starlit heavens can hypnotize you into complete, semiconscious calmness. And if you’re sitting on the edge of a clear northern lake…well, you’ll just drift off into Never Never Land.

            Since the beginning of our time on earth, the moon, sun, planets and stars have given us things of substance to think about, view and otherwise keep our searching minds busy.

            We write songs and poetry about them. We use them to aid us in navigation and to keep track of time. They affect everything we do in one form or another. Some of the largest or strangest structures in our history such as Stonehenge, the Pyramids or devices built by the Anasazi of the American southwest were built to study them. When star ‘a’ was visible through slit number one and inline with hole number two, it meant something. When the sun shone through the opening in one wall and cast its light on a certain spot on another wall, one year had passed.  Of all the time in history we’ve spent on them, the only place we have any effect on is our planet Earth. We are continuously affecting the earth’s ecological balance. As much as we need to take care of it, in some respects we are failing miserably as its caretakers. 

            And as usual, with many things that are serious and important enough to need our intervention, we often just bury our heads as deeply in the sand as possible. It is perfectly clear to me why He didn’t allow us to have even a tiny measure of control over more of this solar system than this earth, and possibly our moon, at sometime in the future.