A Speck on a Speck on a Speck

I have seen the horizon from what ever my vantage point has been while living my fifty-nine years here in Central Pennsylvania. I have stood on various beaches of neighboring New Jersey, our first state Delaware, as well as Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, cast my gaze eastward and wondered at what lay beyond. I have driven across the flat plains of northern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois seeing a horizon uninterrupted by hills and mountains. I believed that the world could not be bigger nor more expansive.

That all changed for me on 11 June 2012. I awoke that morning to the knowledge that I would be several hundred miles at sea aboard the Celebrity Summit steaming methodically towards Bermuda. Upon leaving the stateroom and walking out on the aft deck I was greeted by a site, by a world for which I was unprepared. I was not surprised by what I saw nor was I taken aback by it. Rather I stood in awe of what I was visually perceiving. I was humbled by the vastness of the sea and the sky. The sea was a deep blue that I had never seen nor could I have ever imagined. The blue I was looking at was never ever found in my 128-pack of Crayola crayons. I am sure Sherwin-Williams does not have that blue on any of their paint pallets either. The edge of the sea, zippered to the sky at some far off distant point on the horizon, provided the perfect contrast in colors enabling me to have some feeling for the depth and expanse of the sky and the sea. The blue sky was splashed with the purest of pure white cumulus clouds that added texture and bas relief to my world.

As I stood for a long time soaking in the beauty of God's creation, I began to think just how small a piece I was to the wholeness of the Earth. Like each and every drop of water that comprised the ocean upon which I was sailing, like those water droplets, I am just another speck of humanity that makes up all the sum total of people that ever did or ever will walk the face of this planet.

At night on the same aft deck of the Celebrity Summit, while shielding my eyes from the deck lights, I was able to accomplish the most anticipated part of the voyage. I wanted to see the night sky as God intended for mankind to see it. I did not want street lights or the illuminating glow from some far off mall or town to bleach that which God created for our pleasure from the canvass of the night sky. The black sea sky looked like a black jewelers cloth that had been laid out which then had handfuls of diamonds cast upon it. It was magnificent. Familiar constellations became difficult to identify because they now were comprised of so many more stars. The night black that filled in the spaces between the determining stars of thye heavenly figures were now salted with thousands and thousands of never seen before stars.

This magnificence was ratcheted up a notch when I gazed again at this new found universe through my binoculars. The night sky, the heavens that cover the earth, became three dementional. The thousands of new stars I had just discovered were now joined by millions more. The stars went from being diamonds scattered on a cloth to diamonds suspended in a multi-layered world of black. Wow!

Upon experiencing this I thought that this entire sea experience for me was humbling yet an awaking for me. Humbling because I felt like just a speck, upon the vastness of the sea, which in turn is small in comparison the the size of the Earth, which is small when compared to the size of the solar system, which when placed spinning in the vastness of the universe I just saw, is in and of itself just a speck. A speck on a speck on a speck on a speck on a speck.

It was at this point when I was feeling very diminutive, that I realized that I was wrong in thinking this way. The creator of all that I was seeing and being part of, the same creator that created all this created me too. Not only that He created me and loves me so much that He gave His Son the same human form that I have, sent Him to Earth to experience all the things that I have and eventually was asked to redeem me for the Father upon a Roman cross.

I never expected to get all that from an evening four-hundred plus miles at sea but I did. I am glad I did because I really understand that there is no place that I can go that God isn't there with me and attending to my needs.