goodnight grace
i know that you think
you’re not good for anything
the world makes you feel so small
Compare this with this. They both have something to say about the world as a whole, and they’re both completely, utterly arresting in their own way.
I rediscovered the clip a few months ago after having first seen it a while before. It makes me want to travel like nothing else, to see and experience absolutely everything in the world. Not only that, but it takes the “edge” off the idea of living in another place, if there ever was one–we’re all just people, and we all have the same drives and needs: We all eat and sleep, have conversations and conflicts with our families, work and grow up, learn, fail, cry, laugh… We’re all made in the image of God, and while none of us are innocent in an absolute sense, we’re all recipients of His common grace (“He sends the rain on the righteous and the wicked”), and there’s a kinship that way, a level playing field between the bum on the street in the bad part of town in Winston-Salem and the rice farmer in Cambodia and the Wall Street exec and the belly dancer in Turkey. We’re all equally fallen and equally in need of a Savior, and underneath that most fundamental need, between any two lives in this world there are points of contact all down the line. I love the video for reminding me of that.
And the second link, the picture… What can I say about it? Again, it’s something I had seen before, but only recently resonated since seeing it on one of my NASA movies, the one that covered Apollo 8 (the mission on which the photo was taken). We live on a little blue swirled marble, always half dark, levitating in space. We spin and we twirl unawares around the sun, and around the galaxy, and sail on through our “neighborhood” of galaxies and on through the universe. How small are we? How big is He, to have created and to transcend that universe? And to have made us a planet, created us and placed us here and told us, “Be fruitful and multiply…” Can you imagine the first two people treading the entire globe? It was impossibly big for them, and now we can see its entirety rise over a limb of the Moon. It’s astonishing. The crew of Apollo 8 was right to want to read Scripture after seeing something like that firsthand, but I think I would have picked a different passage, perhaps…