hughbiquitous

Presented here is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The subject is disk galaxy NGC 5866. On a clear night, you might be able to spot this galaxy with a four-inch-wide telescope in your backyard—but it would look like a fuzzy wisp and you’d have to really know what you were looking for. It is about 63,000 times dimmer than the planet Jupiter.

This galaxy is almost 50 million light-years away—what you see here is the way a sliver of the universe looked 50,000,000 years ago.

This galaxy is 60,000 light-years across. That means that a star could explode at one end of the disk and an observer at the opposite end of the disk wouldn’t see it for 60,000 years.

How big is a distance of 60,000 light-years? Let’s suppose you had a map of this galaxy with a scale of 1 atom on the map = 1 meter in space. Got that? 1 atom = 1 meter. Represented on such a map, our entire solar system would fit within one and a half football fields’ area. The USA would occupy a half a millimeter. You and I would need about an atom and a half.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
    and the son of man that you care for him?

— Psalm 8:3-4

But how big would the map be? It would cover 1/3 of the distance from the Earth to the sun. Such a map would be so big, you could use it to gift-wrap all of the planets in the solar system over 25,000 times. And each one of us takes up about an atom’s worth of real estate on that map.

Sorry, that’s the best I can do to make the size of this faraway galaxy even remotely comprehensible.

Then Job answered the Lord and said:

“Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?
    I lay my hand on my mouth.
I have spoken once, and I will not answer;
    twice, but I will proceed no further.”

— Job 40:3-5

But there’s more to it than sheer size. Click on the image above to see a large version. Or if you’re really ambitious, download the 11-megabyte full-resolution version.

Look in the background, far beyond NGC 5866. What do you see?

More galaxies. Lots of them. Literally hundreds of them. They’re all over the place. With millions, maybe billions, of stars in each of them. And those background galaxies are millions-to-billions of light-years farther away.

The heavens declare the glory of God,
    and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

— Psalm 19:1

There’s more. Look closely at the dark edge-on view of the disk. What do you see?

You see tiny dots of bright, bluish light. Those “dots”—barely visible unless you look at the full-resolution version—are clusters of a million stars. Each. Our entire solar system would fit inside one of those dots many, many times over.

We have one star, a wimp by cosmic standards, and it lives a hundred million miles away. It takes light from our sun less than ten minutes to reach us.

In one dot that you can’t see unless you download a gigantic photograph taken by a satellite with a 2.5-hour exposure time, there are millions of stars that put our sun to shame. And their light is just now reaching us after a journey that took 50 million years.

You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning,
    and the heavens are the work of your hands;
they will perish, but you remain;
    they will all wear out like a garment,
like a robe you will roll them up,
    like a garment they will be changed.
But you are the same,
    and your years will have no end.

— Hebrews 1:10-12

No more words… I am undone. O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!

Update: Get Google Earth and view NGC 5866 as it appears in the sky, just west of the Big Dipper.

Christianity is a personal religion in that we are personally related to the God of the universe and are part of his personal family through his love and redemption, and have a place in his personal plan that his his plan for his kingdom that we can personally participate in, and we can be personally empowered to make a personal impact for the cause of Christ.

That’s personal.

But that is not, by and large, how the concept of personal Christianity is understood in our culture today. Nowadays, personal means it’s all about me. And it’s all about my feelings.

If you doubt that, just look at the hymnody that has taken over much of evangelicalism. And you will see that the large majority of it is a celebration of our personal feelings in relationship with God. And there is very little any more, quite frankly, about God. It’s about the Christian and the celebration of the feelings and the experience that we have with him.

Worship is supposed to be “worth-ship,” that is, ascribing worth to God, and there certainly is a place in our hymnody for testimony of what God has done in our life.

But I was at a church this last weekend, and listening, as I spoke there, and I was listening to the music, and it suddenly occurred to me that even those songs that were celebrating our feelings were not testifying to what God was actually doing in our lives. I’m convinced, and you can think about this, you don’t have to agree with me on this particular point, but you just think about this. I’m convinced that the songs were there not to celebrate the feelings everyone was having. The songs were there to create those feelings. And many of the people in the audience were not having those feelings. And they were trying to get them.

I promise you, if your worship is focused on you and your feelings, you will walk out of the church bummed out more often than lifted up. But you can’t lose if your worship focuses in on the excellencies of God.

And whether you walk out feeling great or lousy, you have still ascribed worth to the God of the universe. And you have worshipped well.

— Greg Koukl, Never Read a Bible Verse (Ambassador Basic Curriculum Course 2)

I tend toward perfectionism. I hate it because it is such a joy-killer, but I love it because I get so much mileage out of it. All in all, though, it’s a flaw. Don’t you love it? Perfectionism is a flaw.

At work: I write software for a living; I like my code coherent and tidy. In the kitchen: I have a pizza dough recipe with the ingredients carefully prescribed — in grams. I like my ideas organized, my reasoning sound, and my words precise. (My desk is a mess, but that’s another story.)

The problem is this: nothing ever works quite so cleanly as I hope it will.

Here’s a line I’ve heard more than once and in various forms: “Good is the enemy of Best” or “Good is the enemy of Great.” Sometimes it goes like this: “‘Good enough’ isn’t.” It starts to sound unhealthy… contentedness has to make an appearance at some point.

Proverbs 14:4 was of some help to me:

Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean,
but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.

I like my “manger clean,” but it seems the only way to guarantee that is to forego the oxen, and thereby forego abundant crops — or maybe any crops at all. It seems that God has ordered the world in such a way that a lot of the most fruitful things in life are also some of the messiest things we deal with. (Loving others comes to mind.)

So now I find in Scripture what numerous managers have told me: “it would be nice if we could do everything all nice and tidy, but we’ve got to ship the product.” I hate it when they say that, because at some level, I know they’re right. Now they have Scripture on their side.

What I’m wondering about is this: How does this relate to worship? The subject of worship seems to be coming up a lot lately: David has weighed in on some of the tensions inherent to orchestrating Sunday morning worship services on the production end of things; John preached on worship in spirit and in truth and in all different forms — but absent from his teaching was any suggestion that our worship ought to be “perfect” — whatever that means. (Any ideas?)

So what does a healthy, God-exalting, excellence-pursuing, worshipful, fruitful, and realistic attitude about these things look like?

You made it all
Said, ‘Let there be’
And there was
All that we see
The sound of Your voice
The works of Your hands
You do all things well

Chris Tomlin, All Things Well

Q: What’s the difference between a generalist and a specialist?
A: A specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less, until finally, he knows everything about nothing. A generalist is someone who knows less and less about more and more, until finally, he knows nothing about everything.

FOR ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE CONFUSED, let me clarify: Chris Tomlin was writing about the Lord God Almighty. He was not writing about me.

Unfortunately, I do get confused on that point with alarming frequency.

You are reading the words of a perfectionist, you see, and it’s killing me. “Perfectionism kills your joy,” someone once told me, and so far, they have been right. It is exceedingly difficult for me to derive joy from anything I do unless I am blissfully ignorant of the faults in the works of my hands.

That’s pride, y’all, and God hates it.

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