How amazing is it to look at an image that is billions of light years old? The beauty and the vastness and numbers that are too high to comprehend. and here we are on little planet earth in a small solitary solar system a speck in the midst of universe. And here we are one person out of six billion on the planet.
When I first saw the images I felt small and insignificant. After all, I am one person out of six billion on this planet.
But we haven’t discovered complex life in space. Not yet.
Each life is a miracle. A unique masterpiece with special talents and gifts from God.
I went to a funeral yesterday. The deceased was a wonderful wise gentle priest. Everyone who knew him loved him. As the homilist talked about his life, I thought about his uniqueness, his contributions, and the way he served others. I met a woman who had driven hundreds of miles to his funeral because his husband had been her Sunday school teacher. She told me how he had shaped her life.
Each one of us is a miracle of skin, bones, nerves, tissue, heart, mind, and soul. We are alive on this beautiful planet in the midst of interstellar space so that we can taste the ripe strawberry, feel the warmth of our sun, see the turquoise water, and smell the pink carnations.
What we do matters.
We are it. Maybe other complex life is out there somewhere but as far as we know, we are it.
We are not insignificant. We are part of God’s great universe. We are the stewards of this part of it. We need to take care of it, ourselves and others.
Contemplative Knitting 