Heavens Above (Psalm 8.3-4)

Dumbell Nebula

One of our church members called Nigel likes to look up at the night sky through his telescope. With Madness’ song It Must Be Love playing in the background I was looking at some of Nigel’s pictures this week, including some great shots of the Dumbbell and Ring nebulas and the Great Cluster of about 300,000 stars in the constellation of Hercules.

It is awesome to think that these places are so far away from Earth that light, travelling at 186,000 miles a second, takes between 1,360 years (the Dumbbell Nebula) and 25,100 years (the Great Cluster) to reach us. Wow.

The Ring Nebula

With the Rosetta probe currently orbiting a comet that is hurtling round our solar system at 34,000 miles per hour and the Curiosity laboratory rover still crawling over the surface of Mars two years after landing there, our inquisitiveness to explore the enigmas of space seems greater than ever.

If there’s one thing on TV that I know I’ll drop everything to watch it’s a programme on space. The wonders of the heavens have always fascinated me and always will.

But as a Christian I believe that the One who put it all there, eons and eons ago, loves and cares about us infinitely more than I will ever wonder about the vastness and beauty and mystery of the universe. I also know that in this most violent of summers on the world stage we are so much better at removing our ignorance about worlds that are light years away than we are at removing darkness from the human heart.

I often think of the heavens your hands have made,
and of the moon and stars you put in place.
Then I ask, “Why do you care about us humans?
Why are you concerned for us?” (The Bible, Psalm 8.3-4).

Why indeed? It must be love.

The Great Cluster, Hercules