Anna is drawing faces now... the one on the left is me, can't you tell?

In Place

Anna loves the moon… I know I’ve mentioned that before, but considering her level of affection for the ever-hanging, waxing and waning silvery orb, it’s worth another mention. Whenever we drive at night, she is on a constant search for the moon out of her window and when she finds it, she goes nuts. You know those mornings where you can still see the moon even though the sun is shining brightly? Well, she loves those mornings! When the sun starts to go down at the end of the day, Anna almost always says, “Oh! It’s getting dark outside… I bet that I can go see the moon!”

The other night Anna was all ready to go to bed, but she really wanted to go outside for just a few minutes and see the moon one last time, so I picked her up and we headed out the front door. I put her on my shoulders and we walked up and down the middle of the street pointing out stars and looking for the moon. It was a fairly clear night and we saw tons of stars, but the moon was nowhere to be seen… Anna looked all over the place with no success and finally said, “Hey Dad, I don’t see the moon… maybe it went night-night, just like I’m going night-night.”

It was dark when I left the house the next morning, and when I walked outside, I looked up in the sky and there it was… a huge, bright moon staring down on our little house. It turns out that it was there all along, it had just been hiding behind the few clouds that were in the sky earlier in the night. And the moon always is there, night after night, right where God placed it. Psalm 8 says, “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have set in place, What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?”

I guess I have always thought that those verses were referring to the vastness of the cosmos and that the Psalmist was saying, “When I think of all the huge and immeasurable things You created, it amazes me that You care about a little ‘ole dust creature like me.” But that doesn’t really make a ton of sense, because God cares about all kinds of tiny things too, or else He wouldn’t have made 300,000 species of beetles. And what about the fact that every creature is made up of billions of cells which are made up of even tinier things like proteins, acids and on down to molecules, atoms and electrons… We might be small and we might be made of dust, but isn’t the moon just a big huge clump of dust anyway?

See, I don’t think the Psalmist is amazed by God’s attention and affection toward humans because of size… He says, “When I think of… the moon and stars which You have set in place…” See, the moon was set in place and it does exactly what it was made to do… It shines in the darkness when it is told to and perfectly travels the path God has laid out for it. In fact, everything in God’s creation stays in place… except us. People are the exception. And yet He is mindful of us… even when we aren’t mindful of Him. He cares for us and through His Son has redeemed us and crowned us with glory and honor. We’re the only ones who step out of place, and He loves us still… now that’s amazing!