Daily Devotionals

The heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1 [2]).

How large our problems loom in our eyes, but let's stop and gain a little perspective. Today's airplanes zoom us across the country at about 600 miles per hour. Seems pretty fast, until we think of the speed of light: 186,000 miles ...per second! At this mind-boggling speed, it would take us only a little over eight full minutes to travel the 93 million miles to the sun. From there to the next nearest star would take us over four years.

Let's expand this a bit: we would have to travel 103,000 years at the speed of light to get across the 300 billion stars that make up our Milky Way galaxy; to get to our nearest neighboring galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, would require more than another million years. Remember, too, our galaxy is just one of over 200 billion galaxies in the heavens. The farthest celestial object that we can discern today is about 15 billion light years away, and that's if you travel 186,000 miles each second.

Stop for a moment, ponder these distances, and then remember the words of the Scripture: "[God] has counted the handfuls of water in the sea, measured off the sky with a ruler, gauged how much dust there is on the earth, weighed the mountains on scales,...the hills in a balance" (Isaiah 40:12); this unbelievably vast universe is in the palm of his hand.

This same God loves and cares for us!

...lift my eyes to the heavens and reflect on the wonder of God's creation, remembering that he cares for me. Awesome!

ZG