Star Stuff and the Round-About at Bernards Star...

This week I have been watching some YouTube videos dealing with space and the incredible data that has been collected by the Hubble Telescope. What I have heard and observed this week has convinced me that we do not always see things in the reality that they reside in without the help of a powerful lens. Take for example our picture today. It shows part of the sky as seen by the Hubble Telescope.  The brightest points are all within our galaxy, the Milky Way. They are the objects in this photo that are closest to us and the word close is a tiny bit on the inaccurate side because the light from these stars may have begun the journey to our eyes hundreds of years ago.  What we see in this photograph is not what any of the stars or galaxies look like today, no, using the Hubble lens, we are seeing what they looked like hundreds, thousands, or even billions of years ago.  The scientists can peer further and further back into the past almost to the point where they can see the hand of God putting a match to the fuse on the concentrated ball of matter that was the center of the Big Bang.  As strange as it seems, scientists are more and more becoming more and more convinced about how intelligently the universe has been designed.  The calculations made by these scientists show that if the Big Bang had lasted a nanosecond more, or if there was just a little bit more or less matter at the time of the explosion, the universe would not have formed.  The odds of all of these random factors lining up just perfectly are, excuse the pun, astronomical! 

 Our home, the Milky Way Galaxy contains about four hundred billion stars.  You and I live, love, and die on a blue marble near our sun which is about twenty-seven thousand light years from the galactic core. We are in the Orion arm of the galaxy.  As impressive as that may be, our illustration to the left shows dozens upon dozens of galaxies of all sizes out there.  All of them at distances that make making a visit to them quite impossible for us to contemplate.  While all this is breathtaking, it makes us "bags of mostly water" as a creature on Star Trek once called humans feel a bit puny and quite non-essential to the bigger picture. The Big Bang was instituted by God with YOU in mind.  His calculations from the very beginning included you in them.  Every calculation was perfect and over the eons, our earth was formed, life began, and soon man walked the earth, subduing it and mastering it as God tells us to do in Genesis. When the time was right, you were conceived in the furnace of passion and in about nine months you began your sojourn through space and time. 

God went through a lot of trouble to create you.  Everything had to be in place for you to arrive and He saw to it. In Genesis, when God was finished with all of the work he was doing, he looked it over and saw that it was "very good." What we forget is that God, who lives outside of space and time, saw each of us, and he pronounced us as "very good" too.  This is an important concept because it validates the life of every person who ever lived as being from God and destined to return to God. So, on those days, and all of us have them when the boss is cranky, the baby is crying, the bill collectors are calling, take the time to remind yourself how very important and precious you are to God.  He made only one of you and there will be no Mark II model, you are it. You have been created out of star stuff and placed in this universe to do a job that no one else can do.  For heaven's sake, do it!