The Earth is the Neighborhood We Have Been Given

I was watching a short video about the unfathomable number of galaxies, stars, and planets found in the specific area known as the "Hubble Field". This field is so small to our eyes it should blow your mind. To see the size of it, go outside at night and take a dark and empty part of the sky, then hold a pen or pencil at arm’s length in front of you. Make sure that the point of the pen is in that dark area. The Hubble Field is an area smaller than that point of the pen. The Hubble telescope took a look in a space exactly like that and found millions of billions (a very big number) of objects that are more then 30 billion light years away. The new James Web Telescope sees it more clearly and multiplied the findings exponentially. Take that finding throughout the entire sky and then simply imagine what we still can’t see due our still primitive technology. The numbers of galaxies and stars is beyond our ability to count or even imagine. The amount of space and organization out there is infinitely beyond what we can make sense of.

With my head spinning with those thoughts, I wondered why we are here on this planet and why it feels so big at times, when it obviously is not in relative terms. It is so small compared to the universe but for us here it feels so large. I do not have near enough information to even start to answer that, but I do know a few things. All of this was organized, created, put into place, or whatever words you want to use, by God. God then set up his master plan which is pretty simple. We are to live here for a short time, we are to love Him with all our might, mind, strength and our whole soul. We are also to love our neighbor like ourselves. As part of that plan he set up the biggest and most useful neighborhood we would ever know. “We call it earth, God just calls it a really big neighborhood.” (Bob Goff, "Everybody Always")