One Heck of a Speck

It was heartening, even within the aura of horror, to learn someone — columnist Leonard Pitts to be exact — noticed what seemed to be mostly ignored by even the TV news people who projected the images. Images? They were actually just dots. Pitt’s wrote: Those small dots falling from the sky had names: Last week, at least two men fell from a U.S. military plane as it climbed into the skies above Afghanistan. In video taken from the ground, they are so small you almost have to squint to see them. They seem roughly the size of a period, the end of some sentence no one wrote. But no, we are told those figures are Afghan men, plunging to their deaths… It is a grisly, miserable bookend to an image that began this misadventure 20 years ago — tiny human dots plummeting down the side of a burning New York skyscraper. I saw those skyscraper dots on my TV screen in an airport hotel room where I was holed up alone for five days until boarding one of the first planes allowed to leave LAX. Then, as now, those dots affect me profoundly.

Who Cares?

In the Afghan chaos who cares about those dots? God does. Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it (Matt.10:29). As someone has aptly said “God attends every sparrow’s funeral.” It’s humbling to realize we’re just dots on the landscape of the world — a landscape presently the home of 7.9 billion dots (with names). But it’s also reassuring to know the rest of what God’s Son said in his words quoted in part above. He continued: [Even] the very hairs of your head are all numbered. You’re more valuable to [my Father] than many sparrows. I like the way one of the great creeds of the church expresses this truth: He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven (The Heidelberg Catechism, Question 1: What is your only comfort in life and death?)

Really? You’ve Got to be Kidding!

I confess I have moments when these statements above seem preposterous and absurd. How can this be true? Contrary to common sense is the phrase the dictionary uses for the word preposterous — a phrase that fits my moments of doubt exactly. But those moments always bring to mind something else contrary to common sense — a certain dot. Well, smaller than a dot. A speck. Actually, even smaller than a speck: All the Cosmos that we can observe was condensed into a region much smaller than an atom. [The universe came] from almost nothing (Words of Dr. Alan Guth, celebrated MIT Professor of Physics in describing the Big Bang when that “dot” exploded). That bang, 13.8 billion years ago, produced trillions of galaxies. Each galaxy contains many millions of stars (or suns). Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains more than 400 billion stars. One of those stars, which we call the Sun, has a planet encircling it that we call Earth — our home.

The Amazing Pale Blue Dot

In 1990 Voyager 1 took a photo of Earth from 4 billion miles away. Earth was a pale blue dot seen within a band of light. Scientist, Carl Sagan, said: Look again at that dot… That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love… ever heard of… who ever was, lived out their lives… every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher… every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner… lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 

The Most Amazing Dot of All

The Maker of this vast universe — to drive a car from our solar system to our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would take 47 million years — became a speck on this “mote of dust.” God loved you so much that he became a fellow dot on Earth, sacrificing himself so that if you put your full weight upon Him you’ll live forever (John 3:16 paraphrased). That dot’s name was Jesus. Fida Mohammad and Safiullah Hotak were the dot’s names in the Afghan sky. Pitts cared enough to find out. Hopefully their trust was in Jesus.

Connecting the Dots

Does God really care about that one little dot with your name on it? Look at the night skies: Who do you think made all this? Who marches this army of stars out each night, counts them off, calls each by name — so magnificent! so powerful! — and never overlooks a single one? (Isaiah 40:26 MSG). Even with an estimated 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the Cosmos (more than all the grains of sand on Earth) God calls each by name. You’re more valuable to him than any star. He knows you, your name, and all about you. As I write it’s Monday. In yesterday’s sermon, our pastor spoke of another dot: Imagine an infinitely long line — never ending — stretching east to west. That’s eternity. Now put a small dot on that line. That’s your life. “Your life is like the morning fog — It’s here a little while, then it’s gone (James 4:14).” What you do with that dot is crucial. Don’t forget, you’re special with God. You’re one heck of a speck!