The Final Frontier

As a rapidly aging Boomer, space was a big deal in my childhood.

 

The U.S./Soviet Union space race was thrilling and scary all at once in the atomic age, and by the time I was fifteen, we won—whatever that means. I watched Neil Armstrong leave a footprint in the lunar dust, live on a portable television in grainy black-and-white glory.  

The images that have come from space have always created a sense of awe and wonderment in me. And though I wasn’t a Jesus follower until my twenties, I think something, or Someone, had been tugging at me. As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “If my children wake up on Christmas morning and have somebody to thank for putting candy in their stocking, have I no one to thank for putting two feet in mine?” Or as the psalmist sings, “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.”  PSALM 19:1

It should be obvious. But I suppose I was simply a slow learner.

Today, I think some of the most amazing photographs are the ones from the Hubble Space Telescope and now the deep space photos from the Webb Space Telescope.

This picture at the top is a nebula—an interstellar cloud of gas and dust—that some people call The Eye of God. It’s actually a dying star—you’re looking down through a trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases. This one is nearby—only about 694 light-years away. If you remember your middle school science, a light-year is not about time; it’s about distance.

And we’re talking serious distance, since light travels a foot in a billionth of a second—a nanosecond—so a light-year turns out to be about 6 trillion miles.

Let’s go farther out, about 10,000 light-years away. Above is the Eagle Nebula, a tower of cold gases and dust coming out of a star nursery—a section of the universe that’s continually birthing new stars.

Ridiculous, right?

The photo above captures the farthest star that the ten-billion-dollar Webb Space Telescope has captured in the deep space of our universe. It’s right in the middle of the red circle and about 28 billion light-years away…that’s about 168 septillion miles.

That’s 168,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.

And get this: we’re not even out of our subdivision yet. We’ll find galaxies filled with solar systems beyond that star.

Years ago, I remember watching David Letterman interview physicist and author Brian Greene about the Big Bang. Letterman finally said, “If you’re telling me that before the Big Bang there likely was nothing, then what in the love of God banged?”

Letterman was inadvertently right: the love of God banged. We know a lot about the how, but nothing about the why.

And this is the delicate tightrope we walk as communicators and leaders: balancing a sense of the trembling power of awe and mystery…with the uncanny reality and closeness of God’s tangible love for His creation, and particularly, the individual recipients of our message.

Space makes me feel small and inconsequential. But Jesus makes me feel seen and significant.

Is that what you’re communicating regularly in some way?

A Big God with a Big Love in a Big Universe.

Dave Workman | The Elemental Group

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