Wherever the heavens are, God's love reaches even there.

I recently finished a book by Bill Bryson titled, A Short History of Nearly Everything.  It is an engaging overview of our scientific discoveries and understandings, from astronomy to genetics, from anthropology to physics. I was reminded that everything we know about our world and beyond has been discovered or deciphered by brilliant and creative minds.

When the Psalmist wrote, "Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, and your faithfulness to the clouds," the world was thought to be flat, and the heavens were what was behind the dome where the clouds were suspended and the sun travelled each day. It wasn't all that far away where God dwelled--in those literal "heavens."

What about now? Bryson suggests that, for us, the universe goes only as far as light has travelled in the billions of years since the universe was formed. But that visible universe is a million, million, million, million miles across. And the number of light-years to the edge of the larger, unseen universe would be written not with ten zeroes, not even with a hundred, but with millions.

Wherever the "heavens" are in our 21^st  century scientific construct, we still say, with the Psalmist, that God's love reaches every corner. Especially the dark places, yearning for Light and Hope.

God who stretched the spangled heavens infinite in time and place,

flung the suns in burning radiance through the silent fields of space:

we, your children in your likeness share inventive pow'rs with you;

great Creator, still creating, show us what we yet may do.

                                                                        ELW 771

--Pastor Kent Mueller