So imagine yourself holding up a penny at arm's length. Then visualize how small one of Lincoln's eyes would be with the penny held out at the end of your arm. The director of the Hubble telescope aimed his telescope at a piece of the night sky just about that size and kept it aimed at that tiny point for ten days. They picked a piece of the sky by the Big Dipper, a boring part of the sky that didn't have any bright stars or any galaxies that they knew of. And this is what they found in that little piece of the sky the size of Lincoln's eye on a penny held out at arm's length.
They found thousands of galaxies that they had never seen before. And each galaxy had 100's of billions of stars. Intrigued by their amazing discovery, they wondered if they had happened to aim the telescope at a part of the sky that was unusually crowded. So they repeated the experiment with a part of the southern sky and they found the exact same thing. As a result of this research they now believe that are 50 billion galaxies, each one with hundreds of billions of stars.
Not only that, in the middle of next week we have to move my dad into a different nursing home. His Medicare funding has run out so he has to find a new place. He has a free ride with the VA, but the closest VA nursing home is in Freeport, IL. None of us live in Freeport, IL. I'm the closest and it's a little more than two hours away. The good news is that a dear friend of mine runs a nursing home 1.2 miles from my house and is going to see if she can get a contract with the VA. But that could take months. In the meantime I have to leave my dad with strangers and that just seems wrong. Hopefully they will be the same kind of people who work at my group home, people who really care about their residents and who will treat him with love and respect.
What is the connection between outer space and my dad? It's found in Romans 8:18. "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us." This verse teaches us that being a Christian does not give us an exemption when it comes to suffering. I don't know that the new home will cause my dad to suffer all that much. Dad has no memory of your visit after you leave. He's very happy to see you while you're there, but he doesn't remember it. So he won't be suffering because I can't get up to see him every day. Also, dad has always been a very stoic kind of a guy. He became very accepting of the nursing home he has been living in a remarkably short time. I think he'll probably adapt to the new place just as quickly. But he won't be home and he won't be with family. He could come to live with us but he requires 24 hour supervision and none of us can afford to quit our jobs. And we don't have the money to make the house accessible.
So what do I do with all of this, other than just learn to accept what I can't change? I can do what Christians always must do, what God Himself bids us to do. Like the Hubble telescope I can look up and beyond. It can look at the big picture. And the big picture is that my God made 50 billion galaxies, each one containing 100's of billions of stars, without breaking a sweat. And all of the incomprehensible vastness of space is not big enough to contain my God. He is bigger than space. And this infinite being has big plans for my dad.
These plans are so glorious that all of the suffering that you can experience in a really horrible human life is nothing compared to how wonderful it is going to be in the life to come. The beautiful, perfect mind that created all his is going to spend "the ages to come" expressing the "surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us." (Ephesians 2:7) The infinite, perfect mind of God will spend the rest of forever finding ways to be kind to us.
There is a greatness about the souls in heaven. On earth we might call it "gravitas." There is a nobility. You may be an airhead in this life, but you won't remain an airhead in heaven. Those souls have been fully enlightened and they are creatures of great wisdom. They are also creatures of great and profound joy. They live in an ongoing celestial high where the drug of choice is the love of God which gives you an everlasting high that never stresses or strains you in any way. My mom has already experienced this transformation, and the odds are that my father will experience it before I will. But the day will come when we will all be together again. And we will see more clearly than we can right now that in the grand, cosmic scheme of things that it was not possible for God to create a universe with free will beings who could avoid all suffering.
If you could somehow come to us in that place and ask us, "Was it worth it? Were the trials and pains of your earthly pilgrimage a price too high to pay to come to this place and to be as you are right now?" This is what our answer would most surely be. "'The sufferings' are 'not worthy to be compared with the glory' in which we now exist."
