I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
your handmade sky-jewelry,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way? – Psalm 8:3-4 (The Message)
Why “take a second look our way,” indeed?
We humans have a default setting of placing ourselves in the center of the universe. In our vanity, we reduce the cosmos down to a manageable size and believe things revolve around us.
Science does a really good job of putting us in our place. (Maybe that’s why there’s an anti-science backlash today?) Google “How big is our universe?” and you’ll find mind-boggling articles and videos. Our earth is truly like a grain of sand in an immense desert. Or, as astrophysicist Paul Wallace implied by the title of his book, The Stars Beneath Us: we’re just a speck floating in a swimming pool so big we can’t even see the sides.
And we think we can speak for God? And that our fightings and feudings with each other are justified?
How the Creator must cringe at our self-centered arrogance. Indeed, Lord, “why do you bother with us?”
Then I look at my children, my wife, my friends, my heroes, my mentors, and then I know why. Stronger than the gravitational pull of a black hole is the incomprehensible power of love.
God just couldn’t help “himself.” The wise mind that created all we see and don’t see also has a heart that yearns for us self-deluded creatures. What I feel for those close to me is what God feels, even more strongly, for each of us: the good/bad, the sinful/righteous/self-righteous.
Just as I will never understand quantum mechanics, neither will I understand such love.
I can only, humbly, be grateful.
Love is greatest of all.
Greg, I often ask myself the very question that you posed…and I too, am humbled by the sharing of love I see in my life….perhaps it Can be True, that “Love makes the world go ’round”…
It is another of God’s great mysteries, I guess. I’ve wondered about it a lot. Our limited minds are not capable of comprehending it, at least not mine. But, it is great that He does!
God in His Mercy remembers we are just dust after all. Cosmic dust is another way of seeing it. I’m so thrilled that He loves His creation and has not abandoned us to a cosmic dustpan!