Thursday, March 4, 2021

What Wondrous Love

Read: Revelation 5:1-14

Lynn and I recently watched a documentary about the U.S. space program, Mercury through Apollo, focusing on personnel in mission control. It was overwhelming to be reminded of the teams of engineers, physicists, and mathematicians whose work was voluminous, detailed, and incredibly complex. They enabled hardware with millions of parts to leave Earth, orbit or land on the moon, and return safely to Earth, but I was about to be “whelmed” even more.

A graphic of an Apollo craft orbiting Earth was shown. As the craft was accelerated to achieve transit to the moon, the view was as if the camera was pulling back from the spacecraft, encompassing the entire distance it had to travel. That view evoked a “wow” moment for me. As the camera pulled back, what was (just ask David Bowie) a tin can with people inside shrank and disappeared in the vastness of space.

Our sun is one of about 200 billion stars just in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. In the observable universe it is estimated that there are two trillion galaxies. We are a tiny speck in our own solar system, which is a tiny speck in a galaxy, which is a tiny speck in the known universe.

My prayers often acknowledge the greatness of God in the context of what I wrote above. In the vastness of His creation, He knows us and loves us. Talk about being overwhelmed! Yesterday when I started my car to head to church, the radio, tuned to the bluegrass channel, was playing a beautiful version of Wondrous Love (UMH 292). Consider the words of a verse that doesn’t appear in our hymnal:

Ye winged seraphs fly,
Bear the news, bear the news!
Ye winged seraphs fly
Bear the news!--
Ye winged seraphs fly,
like comets through the sky,
fill vast eternity!
With the news, with the news!
Fill vast eternity
With the news!

Fred Van de Putte