The Personal, Cosmic Artist

I don't ordinarily like writing about stuff I see online. Online is... not real.

But this was different. My boss shared a video from NASA of a photo captured by the Hubble Telescope earlier this year. The images are of the Andromeda Galaxy and although it's one of the largest photographs ever shot, it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what is out there. It's only part of the galaxy and even within the shot, there are hundreds of millions of stars within the image. It's beautiful to behold.

As I watched the video pan from side to side and up and down... I was overwhelmed.

We barely know what is outside the Earth.

We're still figuring out our own solar system of planets and even our moon.

We don't know all that much that's within our oceans.

We're still discovering new species of animals, plants, and the like on a regular basis.

And yet, our great God, the Father of Lights, the Cosmic Artist, created this all in its wonder, knows, and holds it. That in and of itself is humbling and makes me feel small, but what overwhelmed me even more is a second thought I remembered from a close friend at church when he returned from a missions trip several summers ago. The gravity of this truth moved him to tears and I will admit, I was as well when I stopped and considered that magnitude of it all as well.

This very same God... the same Father of Lights... the same Cosmic Artist... is intensely personal, infinitely more so than my very closest friends and desires each of us individually.  I cannot even begin to understand how, let alone why, but it absolutely flattened me that my God loves, saves, and desires every one of us on the deepest level imaginable and is the exact same God whose creation overwhelms man's observation.

I don't understand how He does it all or why because I don't deserve any of this.

But I'm so thankful that He is that way. Both the Cosmic Artist and the Loving Father.