Years ago I lived out in the country, on a hill. It was known as “Woodchuck Hill,” and that may indicate how disconnected it was from cities and towns. Light pollution was not a thing there. If I walked outside of my house on a clear moonless night, the only artificial light was from a radio tower a couple of miles away. The stars were beautiful. Living in cities for many years, the stars where I live now are so unimpressive. But on a warm summer night back on Woodchuck Hill, it was nice to go out on the road and lay down and stare into the sky. At first, I would appreciate the lights in the sky— planets, stars, and the gently lit band across the sky, the Milky Way.
That can be a wonderful experience. But what makes it life-changing is to mentally move it from 2-D to 3-D. I recognize that I am staring into and through a Universe of a scale that far exceeds my ability to grasp. I recognize the planets of next door neighbors, with other stars at every greater distance— with a band of our galaxy spread from horizon to horizon. I then recognize that I am not staring at it through a some giant glass window. Rather, I am exposed to unimaginable open space, with nothing more than an insignificant film of air protecting me. Such a scale cannot be comprehended, but even attempting it draws me back to seeing the power, “size,” and creativity of God.
As I got older, as I discovered that looking bigger and bigger may reveal something about God, I realized the same by looking smaller. As amazing as outer space is, so is inner space. The more one studies quantum physics, the more the tiny is beyond our ability to comprehend. The same can happen with time. God is god through the millennia and even millions and billions of years (I have no problem seeing the Universe as ancient and of divine design… I understand that sime would not agree), but also in the unimaginably small slivers of time where complex interactions happen at frequencies beyond our ability to perceive. And as one realizes how time and space warp to gravity and inertia, the God of time and of space is also the God of Space-Time.
I think we need both. Perhaps, our insignificance is tiny not only in space, but also in time, with untold eons before us, and perhaps after us. At the same time, we are huge, enduring great swaths of time, looking at it from a different perspective. The paradox of God’s transcendence and imminence, should be reconciled without diminishing either, but as our value to God must be held in tension with our apparent insignificance.
God is the god of Big… and the god of Small. The Psalmist suggested it amazing that God could care about us in our small size and ordinariness. However, with an electron microscope the Psalmist may express similar amazement that the God of quarks, sub-atomic particles, photons, atoms, and molecules could care about things so mundane as we. But if God cares about the Big and the Small, as well as of the Durable and the Ephemeral, certainly He could care about us.
