There are no words for the
scale of size and distance involved, and yet at the same time, it
looked like a little thing from my perspective. Weird and glorious
all at once.
"What would you like
to see?" he asked me.
"Everything," I
said.
"That would take
forever," he answered, and smiled, "even in its current
imperfect state."
That was the point of the
Universe, I knew - a playground of materiality for God's children; a
place of infinite variety, complexity and beauty - all for us. Was
this hubris on my part?
No, it is immeasurable
grace on God's part.
It was easy to lose sight
of that fact on-planet. From the surface looking out, our beautiful,
but broken, Big Blue Marble seemed small and insignificant in
comparison to the immense celestial sea in which it floated. But what
does comparative size have to do with importance.
Our world is like the egg
of the Universe. It is the place from which redeemed life will reach
out and populate the sky. That was His plan from the beginning.
"Our Father is
extravagant in His preparations for Eternity," my companion told
me. "You have no idea how much He values us or what He has in
store for His children. He made all of this with us in mind, so that
He could delight in our delight."
"He is...
astonishing" I said, marveling at the magnificence before me.
"Precisely," he
agreed.
"It's easy to imagine
we don't mean much of anything, but we really mean everything, don't
we?" I asked.
He nodded.
I understood then that we
had lost the assurance of our importance and value at the Fall of
Man, and have been trying to get it back ever since - looking
everywhere and believing just about anything except the truth.
Not because He hid it from
us, but because we rejected Him and therefore we would not
see.
It all made a kind of
tragic sense, like a rebellious child refusing to believe in a
parent's love because doing so would obliterate the child's illusion
of being the center of his own existence. Returning that love would
entail an acknowledgement that the child was not what he thought he
wanted to be - his own sovereign.
Rebellion against God is
the ultimate selfishness; the pinnacle of willful blindness. Given
the facts, it is insane.
"The Father wants
each of us to have all this, but we can't without being in Him - the
very source of Life itself. Unless we abide in Him, we can have no
life. It's simple, actually," he said. "Even a child can
understand it."
"Especially a child,"
I agreed.
A moment more of taking in
what was before me brought something else to my understanding: if
this gift of Everything was made just for us, what must it say about
the Maker and Giver?
"Exactly," he
replied, reading my thoughts. "If it would take forever to
explore and come to know Creation, how immeasurably more satisfying
will it be to come to know the Creator as He truly is in Himself?"
In essence, by being
presented with the entire Universe, I was perceiving merely His
fingerprints on the fabric of His handiwork - the forensic evidence
pointing to the One True Cause: Him.
And in my mind, or perhaps
echoing across all Creation itself, I heard that Voice say yet again
what it all meant.
“AND THIS IS ETERNAL
LIFE, THAT THEY MAY KNOW YOU, THE ONLY TRUE GOD, AND JESUS CHRIST
WHOM YOU HAVE SENT."
"There is more,"
my companion said.
© Bill Lilley 2011, 2013
