Such is the same when I find myself outside of the city, looking up at the night sky. There are SO many stars! Some are so far away that they have already burned up by the time the light has traveled far enough that I can see them. And yet, I see them. The sky is so vast, and the stars are so many. I feel like such a small part of the universe; and yet, not in a bad way. More like, I am a very small part of this universe, but obviously an important part if God chose to create me amongst the whole of His creation around me. The whole thing just blows the mind.
Last night, I had my first opportunity to see and photograph a meteor shower. The Perseid Meteor Shower is an annual event, though this is the first I recall hearing of it (or perhaps I've just never been in a position to check it out, so I've never paid attention).
I drove out to the quiet of the Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area, about 45 minutes east of the city. There were a few other star-gazers watching from the hoods of their cars in the gravel parking lot, and one couple who had set up camping chairs about 15 feet from where I set up my camera in the adjacent field space.
While I only managed to capture three meteors across my camera sensor, I saw at least a dozen in the three hours I was there.* Short and long bursts of high-speed light, moving every direction across the sky. And we have been given this light show every year for the last 2,000 years.
Sitting under the infinite sparkle of the sky, I was reminded of something I read years ago. In her book Believing God, Beth Moore talks about God's simultaneous ability for order and creativity. She says,
G.K. Chesterton wrote of a God who "is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old."
Ours is a God who delights in a perfect concoction of creativity and order. Though He could have thought out the entire cosmos into existence in a millisecond, instead He brought it about with great patience in six distinct increments.
Then rested on the seventh.
Then later insisted that His children do the same.
God likes order. He likes repetition. A God of fundamentals, He brings up the sun every morning and the moon every evening, but His creativity within that order is gorgeously displayed in the changing sunsets and sunrises surrounding them.
In reflecting upon this--the repetitive nature of this astronomical event, as well as just the multitude of stars above me--I found myself curious. I found myself wondering: when God was creating the stars, did He place them around the universe one by one, setting each one just so? Or did He hold them like a handful of sand and toss them out all at once?
I'm not sure why that--of all the possible ponderings I could possibly have during an evening of star-gazing--was the question I had, but it was.
And the answer was, I don't know.
And I'm okay that it's I don't know. (I'll find out one day!)
What I KNOW--and am so blessed to know--is that there is an amazing Artist, who can create a million of the same thing, and yet have each one be unique. Who plays with the entire colour spectrum--sometimes one colour at a time, and sometimes all at once. Who bends and moves light. Who blesses the senses.
And all we have to do is sit, take it in, and know.
* That may not seem like many, but think about it--how often do you see even ONE shooting star? Exactly.
