/ One team, Our family.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

I arrived with Vic and Ben at Presbyterian High School in the afternoon; watching the different teams all running about, some in the field still playing the games while others returning to their 'bunks'. I never resented being sick, but somehow both Vic and me felt out of place since we do not know where to go.

Eventually, we stuck around long enough and found out that the next program would be a session with pastor. Excited though lethargic, the afternoon sun, we proceeded to the hall only to find out that the venue was changed to the seminar room as the hall is being used by the floorball cca group of the school.

Off we went, in my heart i was trying to prepare myself for what pastor might be preaching. Evangelism? Personal life consecration? Whatever it was, i am sure it was going to be a powerful and wonderful message like he always shares. Yet, whatever happened next was never in my imagination. Pastor allowed us to view a video excerpt from another pastor, pastor Louie Giglio.

I shall not repeat every single thing he shared, but essentially, the main point pastor Giglio was making is that we are not as big as we think we are. The rich, the poor, whoever you are, you are still a human and just a small part of the entire universe that God has placed you in.

Throughout the sermon, pastor Giglio actually flashed pictures on the screen. Not just any Tom, Dick or Harry's photo but pictures of space, showing off the beauty that God has created.

Of all of them, there definitely were some that caught my attention, like the picture of the Sombrero galaxy as shown below.

Amazing isn't it? Take note how we are just able to see the entire galaxy just because we are situated just above it. So it is as if we are over-looking them.

What struck me the most was definitely the picture taken by the "Voyager I"

This picture seems like nothing, but if you notice closely at the right beam of light, just below the center line, is a pale blue dot. Guess what's that? =).

For those of you who still cant see it, I have circled it in red for you.

Quoted from the astronomer who took this photo:

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

What we see as individuals is limited to what our eyes allows us to see. However, things change when we take another perspective at it. What you perceive of something initially may be so different of what you will think of it when you look at it from another angle. Yet, in most cases, our minds are so rigid as to fix our eyes only from one direction.

We often compare God's love to us with the love that a father has for his child. Lets totally eradicate this perspective and look at it in another way. Through the eyes of the "Voyager I", we see Earth as no larger than a fullstop, a faint speck of dust. Needless to point out, we cant even see ourselves from this distance.

Now imagine you are god, looking from this distance, would you love the 6 billion people that you cannot even see? It is like me asking you now to pick up a speck of dust after you sweep your floor and say that you love the billions of bacteria in it.

Yet remember, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son to pay for the sins of this world.

This reminds me so much of Tom Thumb, my childhood story book.

So the next time you think of how great a father's love is to his child, remember how God even loved his children even though they are so so so small, that even though you and i are equivalent to nothing to Him, He still loves us as much.

I don't know about you, but this video has opened my eyes to see more than what i ever could have seen.

Life is beautiful; because God is life.

P.S. The link to the video is : http://www.268generation.com/videoplayer/player.php?videoid=Indescrwide1&quality=hi

let me end of with this picture. The Whirlpool Galaxy.

Oh! And one more thing, this is the zoomed in photo of the center of the Whirlpool Galaxy.

Cheers!

Yong Jing

7:46 PMAutumn fun.x