A Cork in the Ocean

I am a huge fan of astronomy...the vast and enormous universe is a place that is so wondrous that it can actually stupefy your imagination. We are all familiar with terms like light years, and supernovae, and black holes. These are not only terms that dwarf our sensibilities when it comes to just how far away some things are but just how dangerous it can be to be out there with them.

Then, as a Christian, I think in terms of just how unique our planet Earth truly is. How it can only accommodate our species. How it can be uninhabitable if there was no moon, or we were say, 1,000,000 miles closer or farther away from our son, or if the amount of water on our planet was different. If those things did not exist, neither would we.

We walk out and feel secure on our piece of earth, our sidewalks, or our highways but in reality, all of this place called home, is like a cork in a bottle in a very angry ocean.

We are hurtling through space at millions of miles an hour; we rotate on our axis at 1,000 miles an hour; we have an electromagnetic field which keeps the harmful rays of the sun from baking us like a roast.

We bob along in this galactic lake along with billions of stars with some of those stars possible having planets, and our galaxy is in a much larger ocean with billions of galaxies containing trillions and trillions of stars.

We can always conjecture whether we are alone in this vastness, or if there are other forms of life. We can always theorize what caused all of this to happen in the first place or if there is a divine hand in it all. We can all doubt and deny or otherwise.

But, the truth of the matter is that we are living in a fragile environment. We pollute, we alter, we cause mutations. We have dominion per our Bible but we are also supposed to be stewards of this place as well.

One can look at how we get along or don't and we can examine the causes of discord in our lives on this bobbing cork and feel important. But, in the universal scheme of things, we are nowhere near as important as we would like.

Please keep your lives and interactions in this perspective. It may seem like a very large world to our finite lives and it can take one of our entire finite lives to see it all but do not feel so important that you lose sight of just how precious this world of ours truly is.

• My faith tells me that in spite of all of this enormity, I was created by someone who cared enough to pull me from the staggering probabilities of life that He could have made that day but it was me that He did.
• My faith tells me that He created this place just for us.
• My faith tells me that He wanted to show His love for us but teaching us universal constants to live by.
• My faith tells me that when we decided that we didn't need Him anymore, He loved us anyway and gave us a way to come Home to Him.

My faith tells me that I have a lot to be thankful for in light of this...and I'm going to go and show my gratitude by being obedient today.

Enjoy your Sunday, my friends who believe as I do!