Thursday, January 12, 2006

Our Little Air Soft Pellet

Here's another thing I shared, in part, with our small group. It's a somewhat simple observation, about how it's impossible to get our finite minds around an infinite God.
A month or two ago, my son and I went to the Pacific Science Center, a wonderful science museum in downtown Seattle. One exhibit keeps coming to mind, and yesterday we discussed it in more detail.
They had a clear ball a bit bigger than a basketball that represented the size of the sun. Inside of that were maybe 50 Jupiter representations. Each Jupiter ball had inside of it about 50 Earth representations--such that the Earth balls were about the size of the little plastic pellets our neighbor kids tend to shoot all over the neighborhood with "air soft" guns. (My numbers are no doubt off, but I approximate for the sake of a mental picture.)
Tim and I were pondering: Imagine the sun. It's smaller than many of the other stars out there; yet God made it and all the rest of them. He made Jupiter, and Earth. On one of these little pellets, our little city of about 60,000 would hardly make a pinprick. Within that city, God is familiar with the hair on the head of the smallest person in the city. He even created the germs that make us sick--and each type is distinct and identifiable. Each germ is made up of cells, which in turn are made up of molecules, made up of atoms--all of which God designed. How He designed the big things and the little things and knows how to run them all so perfectly is beyond my comprehension. How He's out there controlling the universe and yet sending some intricately made little germ to humble me when I need it most, I don't know. I can hardly move my fumbly stubby fingers to get the little screws out of the hole to open my son's flashlight battery case, let alone hold a small planet on my shoulders and direct it in some divinely-ordained path.
He's everywhere present. He deals with the vast and infinite, as well as the microscopic and invisible. He runs the passive things of the universe and orchestrates the lives of the stubborn human things of earth. He knows what we know without thinking like we think. He loves us knowing what we know and also what we think and who we hate; loved us while we hated Him--I think His love, great enough to send His Son in light of these things and because of these things, is probably the most amazing part.

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