The Pale Blue Dot

I often find myself making little deals in my head. I do it with a lot of things, but one thing I have been doing it with a lot lately is Dan coming on Young Life staff. As stupid as it may sound, I often find myself daydreaming about all the things I might never have. Things like a lake house, or even a regular house with more than one bathroom, or a new car, or vacations to Hawaii, or the opportunity to not work, or going out to dinner and not worrying about how much the bill will cost, or being able to buy people really nice gifts, or not worrying about how much each item in my cart costs at the grocery store, or paying for college for my kids, or even having more than two or three kids. The list could go on and on.

When I think about all these things, that is when I start to make little deals in my head. Here’s how it works: I see some young mom with her kids riding around in a new SUV. I immediately feel a sense of desire for the car, or that fact she doesn’t work, or both. Then I tell myself, “Meghan, those are worldly desires. The fulfillment they bring won’t last. But, if I keep following God and his plan for my life, I will be more fulfilled than I would be with some new SUV.” I know it may sound kind of dumb, but that really is more or less the way it works. Or the way it did work until my thoughts were kind of turned upside down.

Earlier this week, myself and some other Young Life leaders took a bunch of kids to a concert at Willow Creek (a huge church in Chicago). A funny side note is that Willow Creek is so huge and this concert was drawing in so many people (people were parking everywhere; on the grass, in the middle of the isles, along the street) that as we were walking in, the girls I was with kept saying, “I can’t believe that we are at a church, it feels like an N-Sync concert.” I thought that was funny.

Anyway, we went in and the concert was good, but even better was getting a chance to hear Louie Giglio speak. I guess he’s pretty famous and speaks around the country all the time. So, what he spoke about the other night hit me in a really cool way. He was giving a talk about how BIG God is and how small we are. He did a great job communicating this point through showing a bunch of pictures of space. He showed stars, and galaxies, and the sun, and other planets, and then he showed this really weird and interesting picture of the earth. It is a picture of earth from the farthest away a picture of the earth has ever been taken. It was from like 180,000,000 light years away or something crazy like that. (I’m not really into science, so I can’t remember these kinds of things.)

What was really cool about the picture, which is called “The Pale Blue Dot”, is that the whole earth is literally this tiny tiny tiny pale blue dot. You can almost not even see it on the picture. It gave me a perspective on this earth that I have never had before. I sat there looking at this tiny little pale blue dot and I thought about all the things I worry about, and all my fears, and how I am so self conscious, and all the things I want, and all the SUVs and lake houses and trips to Hawaii. And, it all seemed so insignificant.

Looking at the earth as a tiny pale blue dot, gave me a whole new perspective. It allowed me in a new way to appreciate how BIG and Holy and Awesome God is. He created the pale blue dot, and he knows how small we are (and he still even loves us). It made me think about all the little deals I have been making in my head. Here’s the thing, whether I feel fulfilled or not is really not even important in comparison to God’s glory and majesty. We live in a time where more than any other time we base so much of our theology and life on how we feel, what makes us feel good. It made me realize that if I live my whole life feeling unfulfilled, it doesn’t matter as long as I am living it for God’s glory.