A Grain of Sand Held at Arm’s Length

 A Grain of Sand Held at Arm’s Length

By Bobby Neal Winters

How do you love God?

Christians are taught to love God with all your might and to love your neighbor as yourself.  And it’s not just us, it’s there in Judaism too. 

The older I get, the more I think about it, the harder it becomes.  I suppose that’s why we are told to come to Jesus like little children.

God, we are taught, created the Heavens and the Earth.  The Earth we’ve had a lot of direct experience with, but for so long, the heavens were just up there completely out of reach. Now, there are those who will say that in this context the heavens are symbolic.  They represent something that is completely out of our reach, something that is completely beyond our understanding. I will grant that.

Let me make that symbolic value a bit more powerful by--ironically--making it more concrete.

In contemplating the heavens, we’ve created instruments to help us:  First simple telescopes; then more sophisticated ones;  then radio telescopes; then telescopes in space. 

Right now we’ve got the James Webb space telescope that is positioned in space at a place called the L2 point, which is out beyond the orbit of the earth, out beyond the moon.

One of the first things the James Webb space telescope did was to take a “Deep Field” picture.  This was inspired by the Hubble Deep Field picture which had garnered a lot of attention. In each case, a picture was taken of what to the naked eye was just a tiny piece of empty sky.  In the case of the James Webb space telescope it was a piece of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length.

A grain of sand...at arm’s length.  Do this yourself to see what it’s like.  It won’t matter if you drop the grain of sand because you won’t be able to tell.

What they saw was like what they saw in the Hubble Deep field. Galaxies. Thousands of them.  In an empty spot. Behind a grain of sand. At arm’s length.

This does nothing to diminish the value of “the heavens” as a symbol of the unknowable.

Each of those thousands of galaxies contains something like a hundred billion stars. Most of those stars have planets around them just as big as Earth.

And that is just the stuff we see.

So it’s big.

For the religious person, you can roll that into wherever you keep your idea of the Majesty of God stored.  Even if you are an atheist, you should experience something like awe.  I know of a few who do.

For the Christian, it presents a question. We are to love God.  How can we express that love to the creator of something that is enormous and complex beyond our imagining?

I will be turning 60 next month.  Don’t send me any presents...please.  Last April I was asked three times in a 24-hour period by three people independently of each other whether I had retired yet.  Not if I was thinking of retiring, but whether I’d done it yet.

I am getting old.

Experience is one of the few fruits of old age.  Indeed, it might be an only child. You get older and you get more stuff.  Anything you want, you’ve bought it yourself. What can anyone get you to show you that they love you?

Well, they can give their love to your children or grandchildren.

Seeing that is a gift.  We can see something of God in ourselves even if it is the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length.

Loving your neighbor is loving God. Loving God’s other children is loving Him.

This brings us to potentially a harder question. How do you love your neighbor?  Have you seen some of them? 

Well, you work on that.  They are not hidden behind a grain of sand held at arm’s length.  They are right there.

You’ve got your homework now. Work on it.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )