Last night I came out of the gym into a dark evening with a famished and tired Keira. It was only seven, but the winter sky was darker than usual due to a new moon. A man walked over to us in the parking lot and asked if we wanted to see the Andromeda Galaxy. Hunger forgotten, we exclaimed an exuberant, "Yes!"
Turned out he was the dad of another kid on Keira's gymnastics team. He walked us into the nearby park and up to a telescope that looked like field equipment for NASA. In fact, he referred to it as the "Porsche" of telescopes and spoke of choosing it over a gold watch as he reached a milestone in his company.
We followed his instructions and looked in to see a delicate blue cloud. My time at the telescope did not last long but the image of what I saw has stayed with me all day. My brain almost hurts thinking about a universe that seemingly goes on forever and the God who created it. How could you love something so big?
"Would you like to see Jupiter, too?" the man said. With a few entries into a computer, and some minor adjustments, we poked our eye over the viewfinder again. Muted Easter egg-colored Jupiter showed off her stripes, diagonally placed across her body. The storm was there, too, only it looked dark beige, not red. The man spoke of storms traveling so quickly around Jupiter you could see them move across and back around within hours.
Surely God must love us very much, to make a place for tiny us in the vast universe and to allow us to see and seek this beautiful creation that is space.
"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." - Carl Sagan
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