Friday, March 30, 2007


Outshining Stars

Hurry! Run for the hills! I just read that our solar system is moving at a break-neck speed of 43,000 miles per hour toward a cluster of stars we call the Hercules constellation which is in the Andromeda galaxy, and here’s the really bad news… the Andromeda galaxy itself (which is huge and made up of around one trillion stars) is speeding its way toward our sun at the speed of 186 miles per second!

Actually, you don’t have to get too worked up about it because the Andromeda galaxy is around 2.5 million light years away from the Milky Way where we are safely tucked away. Our universe is so huge and full of wonders… explosive and dangerous stars, multicolored spiral, speeding, spinning nebulae and worm holes where the time continuum gets twisted up and stretched like saltwater taffy… Did you know that there was a comet called Hyakutake that was so big and full of ice that when it was passing near the sun it was ejecting 10 tons of water in its wake every second?! Did you know that there is a star in the Orion constellation called Alnilam that is 1,360 light years away from us and is 112,000 times brighter than our sun?! Did you know that our sun sometimes spits out a bunch of extra electrons and when they get to us, they sort of ignite upon hitting our atmosphere giving the folks in the northern part of the western hemisphere a celestial fireworks show we call the Northern Lights?

You see outer space is full of the biggest, fastest, brightest, coolest, most interesting, colorful and most beautiful things in all the universe… but did you know that we’re still God’s favorites? That’s right… us little bitty humans. We may be small, slow, dull, lumpy and wrinkled, but He still likes us the best. We may not always follow the path He’s set out for us the way heavenly bodies do, but He still leads us on. Each one of our hearts may have more darkness than the vast reaches of the celestial void, but He still causes His light to shine in there. Why is this so? Why does God like us better than stars, comets and galaxies? Well, because He just decided to.

Deuteronomy 10 says this, “To the Lord your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord set His affection on your forefathers and loved them, and He chose you…” See, even though God has Orion’s belt in His closet and both the big and little dippers in His kitchen cabinets, the thing that He really loves is people. Why? Because He set His affection on us, loves us and chose us. And then He became one of us in the person of Jesus, lived as one of us and died for all of us to pay for all of that darkness so that we might become as Paul says in Philippians 2, “…blameless and pure children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation in which you shine like stars in the universe.”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My darling,
You are the best! Thanks for taking time out to write down these meditations to bless and encourage the rest of us. I love you more than I could ever say...
Yours, Bibi

Cluster Map