Happy Valentine's Day (originally posted 2/14/07)

Today is the day we celebrate LOVE, right? I know romantic love is more in line with today's holiday, but I couldn't help but think about some of Louie Giglio's words from last weekend. We had the privilige of seeing Chris Tomlin in concert on Saturday night and Louie speaks during Chris' intermission time. While I would not say that science is my strongest subject, I was fascinated with some of the images from space that Louie shared. One of those is the picture I posted of the Whirlpool Galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and located a mere 31 million light years away. Louie gave all of us non-scientists some analogies to help us understand the size of our planet in relationship to the sun and the distance of this galaxy from our own. While I cannot remember the billions and trillions of numbers he was throwing out, I was struck by the fact that our God is BIG.
That may sound simple, but Louie referred us to a verse in Psalm 33 (v.6):
"By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth."
So God just breathes and he creates this amazing universe that is located so far away from us that we need a super-powerful telescope to be orbiting in space in order to get pictures of it. And if you might doubt that God is a part of this scientific discovery, take a look at the picture of the black hole that sits inside the whirlpool galaxy - does the image remind you of anything?
At this point during Louie's talk, I began to feel like I was a tiny dot living in a bunch of wooden toothpicks on a golf ball-sized planet - pretty insignificant. But just as if God knew that I was feeling that way, Louie shifted gears and gave us another beginner science lesson on cell creation in the womb. And after explaining the miracle of how we develop from a 4-celled organism to an amazing functioning human being in just 9 months, I remembered that Psalm also tells us of how God saw my substance before it was formed and all my days were written in His book before one of them even existed. My God is big, but He's into the details of me too. That makes me feel loved on Valentine's Day.