God is big enough to have created everything visible and invisible in the entire universe, and small enough to have been conceived in the womb of a teenage girl.
As the Irish abbot, St. Columban, wrote: “God is everywhere in his immensity, and everywhere close at hand.”
I can noodle on concepts like this because I’m writing from South Florida where I can watch sunsets over the Gulf of Mexico from my chair on the beach sans schedules, demands, or time constraints.
One of my sons lives in Seattle with his wife and three children. On a recent phone call with his 9 year old son, Judah, I asked him to tell me about his favorite home school activity during the pandemic. He introduced me to a You Tube Channel with 3.78 million subscribers called “What If?”. Each episode highlights a hypothetical question about some aspect of science in our universe to stir the imagination. His favorite was “What if we dumped our trash into volcanoes?” That drew 13 million other viewers. Naturally the imagination of his grandfather, whose blog “views life and the world through a different lens,” was stoked by this channel, too. Not sufficiently, mind you, to watch his 4:26 video. Though I was able to carve out 6:47 to watch the “What If We Never Aged?” episode. Go figure.
By Tom Kneier
It was a beautiful letdown when I crashed and burned;
when I found myself alone, unknown, unheard.
It was a beautiful letdown the day I knew
That all the riches this world had to offer me would never do.
In a world full of bitter pain, bitter doubts,
I was trying so hard to fit in, fit in,
Until I found out, that I don’t belong here.
from the song, “The Beautiful letdown”, by switchfoot
An American astronaut named Scott Kelly currently holds the record for the longest continuous time in space – 340 days. From March 28, 2015 to March 1, 2016, Kelly called the International Space Station his home. In his book, Endurance, Kelly recounts those days in vivid detail. The length of the ship consisted of three American modules and two Russian. The port and starboard were made up of three Russian modules and one each from Europe, Japan, and the United States. It was the combined work of fifteen nations over an eighteen month period.
