He Calls Them by Name!

As a young boy, my family would often drive in the middle of the night to visit relatives in California. Why in the middle of the night you ask? To avoid the crazy heat that accompanies the barren Nevada dessert. That’s why! Yes, this was always a good call (especially in a car that didn’t have working AC!). The exciting thing about the journey was stopping alongside the highway in pitch blackness, miles from any city light in the middle of nowhere to observe the stars that lit up the night’s sky. It was then that I first caught a glimpse of the Milky Way… billions upon billions of stars in our galaxy blurring together in a spectacle of wonder.

I imagine you’ve been awed by the stars on a clear, moonless night, but have you ever actually thought about how big the universe truly is? Let’s try to put this into perspective. From my house on a Sunday morning, it takes about 8 minutes to get to the church (okay, that may be going a bit fast!). Suppose I was driving at 670,616,629 miles an hour (the speed of light), I

could actually drive to the sun in that amount of time (8 light minutes or 92,750,680 miles). Sounds far, huh? That’s nothing! The Sun is the closest star to the Earth. Proxima Centauri is the next closest star and is a ridiculous 4.2 light years away… yes, the amount of time it takes light to travel in 4.2 years (1 light year=5,878,625,373,183.61 miles.) We’ve only just begun☺

Ever heard of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (http://www.sdss.org)? …absolutely amazing! By 2010, they will have mapped out 1/4 of the sky or nearly100 million galaxies. Each galaxy is estimated to contain 200-400 billion stars (I know these are quite large numbers, but hang in there!). Our tiny, puny little planet Earth is a part of the Milky Way galaxy. To get an idea of the vastness of just our galaxy alone, it would take 100,000 years traveling the speed of light to get from one end to the other.

The next closest galaxy to ours is the Andromeda Galaxy, which is 2.5 million light years away. The remarkable thing about this galaxy is that it can actually be seen without a telescope. Granted it looks like a smudge of faint light, but it is the farthest object seen by the naked eye. By now, I imagine I’ve lost some of you— okay, probably all of you… millions of light years just doesn’t register. But hopefully I’ve gotten my point across. The universe is HUGE (okay, that might kind of be an understatement)! Numbers this large are hard to comprehend… like a person born blind trying to understand what color is.

Isaiah 40:26 says that God created the stars and “calls them by name.” If He knows the names of 30 thousand billion billion stars (the universe is believed to contain over 100 billion galaxies each with an average of 300 billion stars), where do we fit into the picture? Well, He not only knows us by name, He knows the very number of hairs on our head (Mt. 10:30). David wondered how this could be so, “When I consider Your heavens… what is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (Ps. 8:3-4). Like the stars, we are a part of His creation; but unlike the stars, we were created in His very image with the capacity to think, feel, and reason.

He also cares intimately about ever detail of our lives (Luke 12:6-7)! Nothing is too big or small to take to the Almighty! What hardship are you facing today? Is there a difficulty in your life that just seems too much to handle? He is more than mighty enough to comfort you in the midst of your pain! Once again, pondering creation, David writes, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their sorrows. He counts the number of stars; He calls them all by name. Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; His understanding is infinite” (Ps. 147:3-5).
Surely a God who knows the names of billions of stars is big enough to comfort and heal our pain. Yes, He is truly awesome. We see the greatness of Who He is reflected in the night’s sky… and the crazy thing is that the stars and galaxies only reflect a glimpse of His majesty and splendor (Ps. 19:1)!

So, the next time you have a chance to gaze into the starry heavens, think about how absolutely amazing God is, and remember that He is more than big enough to take care of whatever it is that you are going through.