Easter is in a few weeks, which means it’s Lent right now and Poppy has been using the time for some prayerful reflection and, well… just pondering the Greatness.
One of those ponderings — one that has lived rent-free in Poppy’s head for years — marries the amazing science of the universe with one of the ways she knows Who created it: through a hypothetical empty room.
Imagine standing in the center of a room utterly without light or sound and you are unable to move. Without anything to reflect your presence back to you, you have no idea how big the room is, anything about its contents, or even the nature of it. You pretty much know nothing about anything — except that you exist in it.
Now, scale it up. Imagine all the matter in the universe — stars, planets, comets, even the ancient radio waves scientists believe were emitted billions of years ago — is gone. It’s just us, the sun for warmth and light, and the moon for tides. We’d have no sense of scale anywhere beyond about 93 million miles. No idea how to measure where we are. Just existence in the dark and nothing to give us any sense of distance or size or anything.
What on Earth (yes, pun intended) do you mean, Poppy? Well, that’s where the empty room comes in.
Even though humans have indeed left Earth a handful of times, in the colossal scale of the universe, we haven’t really stepped into it. We are, as a species, still that unmoving person in the dark room.
But there’s this: “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so.” ~Genesis 1:14-15
As a Bible reader, Poppy believes there’s a lot of ‘Because I said so’ in its pages because, let’s be honest, it took us an embarrassingly long time just to figure out fire, and God knew His audience wasn’t going to be ready for general relativity for quite some time. But, since the beginning of time, we humans have always had lights in the room and walls of a sort, every time we looked up.
From our ancestors pondering the stars around tribal fires to last month’s photo of a lunar sunrise from the world’s first commercial moon landing, we have been gifted with the awe-filled notion of how small we are. And in addition to giving us light and seasons, our Creator also gave us something else: The physical evidence necessary for us to understand how big Creation is. With that comes the sense that the One who made it — the energy, the galaxies, and the physics to manage them — can certainly reanimate a Human person when He feels like it.
Of course, Easter is much more profound than that, but Poppy is no pastor and always aims to simply entertain while hoping to make her dear readers just think about stuff.
People who aren’t Neil DeGrasse Tyson rarely stop to think about how weird it is that the universe even exists. That there are stars and planets and, for some reason, sea cucumbers. But perhaps we should.
Maybe a more secular metaphor. If it were just you, your e-mail, and Wikipedia, you’d have no idea how big the Internet really is. But toss in a billion cat videos, Tik-Tok burp challenges, conspiracy theories about a flat Earth, and ads for antique butter churns because you once Googled ‘How was butter made in the 1800s?’ and, suddenly, you grasp its true scale.
The same applies to the cosmos. If it were just us, the sun, and the moon, we’d never comprehend the reality of its vastness. But, providentially, we get galaxies upon galaxies, black holes doing whatever black holes do, and a sky so big that even Poppy’s dear old mom couldn’t fill it up with conversation at Easter brunch.
And yet, here we are, on one little rock, looking up and wondering why? Maybe faith is like cosmic Wi-Fi — it’s everywhere, even if everyone doesn’t see the signal bars. Or maybe Creation had to be this complex so we’d realize that something, or Someone, had to have done it on purpose. And, in case you were wondering, Psalm 19:1: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
Seriously, if He can create this super busy universe — from the Oort Cloud to waterbears — just to give us a sense of scale… then rolling away one stone on a Sunday morning? Please. Child’s play.
Wishing everyone a joyous — and infinite — Resurrection Day!