Hey, Y'all,
Today's RST is again based on Yancey's book on prayer--read on, enjoy, and ponder.
Every now and then I get a glimmer of my true state: a helpless, tiny, two-legged creature perched on the skin of a molten planet. Here's some perspective: if the Milky Way galaxy were the size of the continent of North America, our entire solar system would fit in a coffee cup. Yet this vast neighborhood of our sun (it would take over 15 hours for a radio message traveling at the speed of light to reach Pluto at its edge)--this solar system, which is in fact smaller than a cup of coffee--fits along with several hundred billion other such stars and their planets in the Milky Way, which itself is one of perhaps 100 billion such galaxies in the universe.
No wonder the Psalmist--with but a fraction of our understanding of our true puniness--exclaimed "When I consider 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?" An excellent question, as well as a reminder of a point of view I easily forget.
To explore the mystery of prayer I begin here, recalling the vantage I get from the summit of a mountain looking down or from an observatory looking up. Each provides a mere sliver of a glimpse of reality as God sees it. Like a flash of lightning at night, prayer exposes for a millisecond what I would prefer to ignore: my own true state of fragility and dependence. Undone tasks ever accumulating, family and friends and other relationships, temptations and questions, plans for the future, regrets about the past--all of these things I bring into that larger reality, God's sphere, where I find them curiously upended.
You've been prayed for today...
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