One Second: Light
As I sat in the room, head bowed, the ticking of the clock flowed into the silence, almost as though the clock itself wanted to have its say. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock…second after second after second. My mind moved from hearing a series of ticks and tocks to recognizing the silence between each movement of the clock’s second hand, amazed at how powerful such a small interval could actually be…
Between each tick and tock, you know how far a ray of light can travel? Over seven times around the earth. Light - it’s fast. 186,282 miles per second. In fact, it’s so fast, it’s speed is used to measure distance across our universe - well, the part that we know of so far. 156 billion light years across. Just think about that. Starting from one side and going to the other side would take 156 million years. Oh yeah, and that’s travelling at the speed of light. That’s a lot of ticks and tocks.
But back to light. So where did it come from? The bible tells us that God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. This blows my mind. God opens his mouth and out comes light. And where does the majority of light come from on our little planet? Our sun. So can we take that God basically breathed out the sun? He spoke the sun into existence? Perhaps.
The most powerful thing we have on earth is the nuclear bomb. We know the devastating effects this can have on the planet and on people. However, if we take the amount of energy produced by the sun per second, it is equivalent to 7 trillion Hiroshima atomic bombs. That’s per second. So every second, the sun gets another 7 trillion bombs and sets them off. Tick tock. Another 7 trillion. Tick tock, BANG. Tick tock, BANG. Tick tock…
Think about it: this all came from God. And our sun is not really that impressive compared to other stars in our galaxy. It’s pretty average really. God set billions more stars into the universe besides ours, most of them more impressive. But even our mediocre star is too big for our little minds to really fathom.
The really weird thing is that this same God, the one who spoke this furious mass of heat into existence, furiously loves each one of us. He wants nothing more than for us to be left awestruck by his awesomeness; to heap much praise on him; to make much of him simply because he deserves to be made much of. And more than this, he wants to meet with us every day. He even let his own son be killed to open the way for us to meet with him. For us, we who are so small. To meet with God, He who is indefinably powerful.
It blows my mind every second.
