A Million
Posted by: richman in harold sala, tags: inspirational, motivational, spiritualTo whom will you compare me? Or who is my equal? says the Holy One. Lift your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one, and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing. Isaiah 40:24, 26
Jan Nichols, chairman of a science department in a high school, launched two projects for his students: one, demonstrating how small things are which can be seen only with intense magnification, and two, how large some things are which are in space. Once Nichols launched the project he began to realize that when teachers talked about light years and millions of miles, students didn’t have the foggiest notion of what he was talking about.
He decided to do something. As part of the project, he arranged for students to count to a million. Participating were 900 students, and it took them 18,000 minutes or 300 hours, which translates to 12 and a half 24-hour days, to just count to a million. When they got down to the last 10,000, the began picking up kernels of popcorn and putting them in large bottles–it took 75 bottles the size used in water coolers to just hold the popcorn. Tara Schafer, a 13-year-old who participated in the project said, “If we hadn’t counted it ourselves I wouldn’t have believed it was one million. I would probably have thought it was about 10 million because I could never imagine exactly how much that really was.”
Numbers are almost meaningless unless there is something by which we can measure them. For example, a diorama–a miniature landscape–can be photographed looking as large as life itself. Actually, that’s what movie producers often do, giving the effect of a ship blown on a stormy ocean when, in reality, the ship is a miniature and the ocean is an overgrown bath tub with fans blowing the water.
When it comes to space, however, there is little by which we can measure it. That’s why scientists beginning in 1888 began to use the expression “light- years” to express the distance to stars and heavenly bodies. Technically a light-year is “a unit of length in interstellar astronomy equal to the distance that light travels in one year in a vacuum, or about 5.878 trillion miles.” And that’s an extremely long distance to traverse, even if you have a bicycle.
Our closest star is Alpha Centauri. It is five times the size of our Sun, and it takes 4.5 years for light to reach us from that star. Compare that with 1.5 seconds for light to reach us from the moon. And remember, that’s the closest star.
Is it any wonder that Isaiah recorded the words of the Almighty as He cried out, “To whom will you compare me? Or who is my equal? says the Holy One. Lift your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one, and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing” (Isaiah 40:24, 26).
Comprehending the immensity of space is rather frightening if we think of God as being at the farthest end of our universe–somewhere out there at the end of the string. But what we fail to remember is that God is not bound by space or time. Someone wrote graffiti on a wall which read, “GOD IS NOWHERE.” But a little girl read it saying, “Look mom–the sign says, ‘God is now here!’” He is a close as your faintest heart cry. As Isaiah wrote, “The LORD’S hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear” (Isaiah 59:1, KJV). With God, numbers–whether they represent the number of people or the distance of objects in space–never represent separation or challenge. He’s beyond that–for which we can be very, very thankful.
Resource reading: Isaiah 59:1-21.
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“The preceding material was written by Dr. Harold J. Sala, and is copyrighted. Reproduction for sale or financial profit is prohibited. Permission to reproduce this article was granted by Guidelines, Inc.”
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