Whenever I fly it always gives me a sense of just how big the world is and how tiny I am in it. It’s been said that flight, the invention of the internet and other such things, have made the world a smaller place. I disagree. I think we are just now better equipped to grasp just how vast the earth really is.
It starts before I even get on board the plane. Sitting at an airport and watching thousands of people come and go, hurrying to travel to different destinations all over the globe, each for different purposes, different reasons for travelling. Flying up above the clouds and thinking how huge the sky is, and how far the universe goes on beyond, how many millions of people are waking up on the ground below, into a million different situations. How many conversations are going on at that one point in time, how many children are being born, how many lives lost… in every passing moment.
It makes my brain hurt.
I think about how complex my life is, how many people I know, how I feel about each one of them. The issues I have. My hopes, fears, prayers, memories, desires. All the different situations I’m in and who I am to different groups of people. And then realise that everyone’s life is at least as complex as mine. I am one in 6.5 billion. And somehow they all fit together, and we all exist together, and interact, and impact each other. Yet so much of the time we only think about our own complicated existence, never considering that everyone else has just as much of an intricate mixture of things and people in their lives. We exist so much inside our own heads. Everybody in the world, all 6.5 billion of us, has a myriad of thoughts in their minds at this precise moment.
I haven’t even started on my thoughts of the rest of creation outside of the human race! Billions of bizaare species of every creature imaginable… all living, breathing, hunting, breeding, fighting, growing. There is so much going on in the world in every split second. Rain, snow, hurricanes, tropical storms, blizzards, sunshine, fog, hurricanes. And every part of the world is different somehow, yet it all keeps going.
And beyond the earth, above the sky… huge lumps of rock and ice hurtling through the vast expanse of space, orbiting a giant ball of flaming gas, perfectly balanced in it’s gravitational pull. Beyond that… galaxies of stars, stretching on and on and on… and we think this world is big?? I am this miniscule creature, amongst billions of others, on a tiny rock, in the smallest corner of God’s universe! And yet…
“Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”
- Luke 12:6-7
God knows how many hairs I have on my head. How many cells I am composed of. He knows every thought I have ever had and ever will have. He is holding together every part of me and sustaining my existence every passing second. By His power I keep breathing. And not just me, but everyone. All 6.5 billion of us. Those who love Him and those who hate Him. He sustains his enemies even as they defy Him and deny Him and rage against Him. And even more than this… not only did God create me, and continue to sustain me, but He loves me. And not a fleeting love as we know the term, but real, deep, never-ending love. Love enough to send his son to die in my place, when I did not even want to know him.
“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
- Romans 5:6-8
That is grace and mercy at an utterly incomprehensible level!!!
Also appearing in Heroes are Greg Grunberg (as Matt Parkman) and David Anders (as Takezo Kensei) who both starred in ALIAS.
