A Tiny Pea

I know that the Lord is great,
    that our Lord is greater than all gods.
The Lord does whatever pleases him,
    in the heavens and on the earth,
    in the seas and all their depths.
He makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth;
    he sends lightning with the rain
    and brings out the wind from his storehouses.

Psalm 135:5-7

“To whom will you compare me?
    Or who is my equal?” says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
    Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
    and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
    not one of them is missing.

Isaiah 40:25-26

“When astronaut Neil Armstrong was in space, he said, ‘It suddenly struck me that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.’
“The universe is just a small example of God’s creative power. The Earth is one of eight planets in the solar system. As the dominant light of the solar system, the Sun has a diameter of approximately 860,000 miles and could hold one million planets the size of the Earth. Yet it’s only an average star among 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. It takes 100,000 light-years to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other. A light year is the distance that light travels in one year, which is nearly 6 trillion miles. And scientists estimate there are billions of galaxies in the universe!
“When you gaze up into the heavens, reflect with awe at what your Creator has made. And remember that, despite any challenges in your life and in America, He has it all in the palm of His hand. From the name of every star in the heavens (Psalm 147:4) to the number of hairs on your head (Luke 12:7), He knows all. And He loves you!”

Presidential Prayer Team Devotion

In the photo above, you see the Apollo 11 patch that I received while a volunteer scouter in 1969-70, not yet an adult by scouting standards. My uncle, a scoutmaster in Florida near the Kennedy Space Flight Center, met Neil Armstrong, obtaining some of the patches that went to the moon in a box, carried by Armstrong to the moon. The instructions for their use was to give them to Eagle Scouts who were still working, helping the younger scouts.

Even before the journey to the moon, in the design of the patch, the earth was woven into the patch as a little pea in the distance as the Eagle, the name for the lunar landing craft, swoops down onto the surface of the moon.

How could anyone look into the sky and not see the greatness of God? If I had created the universe, there would have been planets colliding long ago. It would be a total wreck by now. If it had been random… Forget about it. Just our solar system alone has so many unique features to protect the earth so that life could even exist on the planet: the distance from the sun, the size of earth, the larger planets further from the sun to absorb the blows from non-orbital space junk, and even the moon protects us from such collisions.

But what is also amazing is Armstrong’s humility. After all, he was the first man to step onto the moon, and he preferred a quiet life after his retirement as an astronaut. Although he served on some commissions, such as the Apollo 13 mishap investigation, he rejected any political career, preferring to teach and live on a dairy farm.

What would I do in his shoes? I have no clue. Would I have felt like a giant when I could take my thumb and cause the earth to disappear, or would the experience make me feel even smaller?

But what it does do is show how great and powerful our God is. The Russians taunted God when they entered outer space and reported that God did not exist, because they were in space and could not see Him. Yet, everything they saw was created by the hand of God, and the true God lives outside time and space. God is a spirit. I cannot see Him, but He lives within me and He looks over my shoulders as I try to not type the wrong letter on the keyboard. (With that knowledge going through my brain, that last sentence was extremely hard to type, hitting a couple of wrong keys – since, corrected.)

And isn’t that the point? When we see how grand, how wonderful, and how powerful God is, who are we to question Him? We should bow down in awe of a God that is so great. Yet, He lifts us from the floor where we fell, in awe, in His presence. He hugs us and calls us by name. He calls us family, because He loves us.

Pardon the language of my youth, but HOW COOL IS THAT?!?!

Soli Deo Gloria. Only to God be the Glory.