The God of Galaxies and Marbles

I am the one who made the earth
and created people to live on it.
With my hands I stretched out the heavens.
All the stars are at my command. - Isaiah 45:12

My dad sent me an e-mail the other day with the following pictures in it - hang with me here, this stuff actually deserves the adjective "awesome". The first shows just the planets in our galaxy and their size compared to our sun. For the record you could fit 1 million planet earths inside our sun.

This one shows Antares, the 15th or 16th biggest star in the night sky, and how it compares to our Sun.

Keep in mind we're only looking at our own galaxy here, so within this gigantic neighborhood we call the Milky Way, Earth is already so small it can't be seen. Now if we step outside of our own galaxy for a second (or a bazillion light years) to check out the neighbors, there are literally countless other galaxies out there stretching beyond what we can see with even our greatest telescopes. Here's a small glimpse of that:

Source: Hubblesite.org

Ok, one more and then I'll tell you what God showed me. Here's a close up of one of the darkest spots in the picture - you might think there's nothing out there, but you would be wrong.

More galaxies, more universe, a small glimpse of what eternity looks like. When I saw that last shot I heard very clearly in my head "My God plays with galaxies like they're marbles"...and He could. The God who loves you and me so much that He shrugged off some power and crammed Himself into a tiny human body in order to rescue us all, has the ability to easily grab a handful of galaxies, including ours, and play a little game with them. On that scale, we're not even visible anymore and yet this same God can tell you exactly how many hairs are on your head and how many grains of sand there are on the earth. He manages to care about every little thing going on here while spinning whole solar systems that we're not even aware of. I can't find the words to paint Him big enough, but in my head and in my heart He gets bigger and bigger each year and I'm only just getting started.

We tend to think so highly of ourselves and get so caught up in our problems and disappointments, but if we could only see Him more clearly, all of that would fall away and we would stand in awe...or fall over dead. We're literally nothing compared to Him but in His beautiful mercy and unfailing love He has chosen us as His bride and that should define our whole lives for us. The God whose birth we celebrate this month has the ability be both infinitely big and infinitely small without ever losing any of His glory. I can't even make myself talk to someone who smells bad some days, and yet He came down and mingled with a bunch of worms (don't yell at me, I'm quoting Isaiah) for 33 years and loved us to death.

This Christmas let's think about what it means that God became flesh and lived among us. That's far more amazing than what we tend to focus on for Christmas and Santa's got nothing on Jesus.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. - John 1:14

For more amazing pictures of what God's doing in the Universe check out www.hubblesite.org. Here's one of my favorites - I like to call it the Eye of God.