Is Your God Too Small?

The Hubble Space Telescope snaps pictures of beautiful images of other places. The picture I have included with this blog entry is a picture of a spiral galaxy. It is an amazing gift to be able to look into space and see the beauty of God’s creation. But what really gets me is that the picture was taken in 2010. That means that in 2010 we took a picture of something 72 million years old. We actually snapped a shot of history.

If you’re saying, “What?” let me explain: The spiral galaxy is 72 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. A light-year is the distance a particle of light (photon) will travel in one year. The distance light travels in one year is about 9.461 × 1015 meters (9.461 petrametres), or about 5.879 × 1012 (nearly six trillion) miles. This means that a picture of something 72 million light-years away shows the way things were 72 million years ago.

That means that in 2010 we took a picture of something 72 million years old?

Now when we think about time as humans something like that almost seems impossible. I mean, how often do we say, “There isn’t enough time in the day?” How often do we rely on calendars, clocks, daylight, and death to determine the amount of time we have. Yet God doesn’t work on the same time schedule. God is actually beyond time.

We occasionally experience time differently too. We have those days that fly by so quickly it’s as if it never even began. Then we have moments when 5 minutes seems like 5 hours. Time is a funny thing and changes with our prospective on life. God never changes. God is beyond time, beyond daily pressures, beyond our understanding of life and death. God is Awesome!