Sun

We are so familiar with the sun. It's that bright, happy ball that gives us light and warmth. We know life could not exist without it and that the earth orbits around it. That's our daily reality, so part of our normal existence that it's easy to take the sun for granted. That's earth-centric thinking.

The other reality is the stuff of science class: the gee-whiz numbers that are hard to fathom and fill us with wonder. That sweet happy ball of sun is really an explosive gaseous sphere that is more than a million times larger than the earth. It's performing millions of tons of nuclear fusion every second and its core reaches temperatures above 6 million °C.

To me, this is an interesting analogy for our relationship with God. On the daily level, He's familiar and goodness and light and love. We know life could not exist without Him. Our world is centered on His creative force and upholding power. It's easy to take this for granted. It's also easy to limit God to "us thinking", to picture Him only as the Being Who created us and upholds us day to day and saved us by the death of His son and has prepared a home for us in heaven. But that's earth- or human-centric thinking.

God is much grander than the scope of our understandings and dealings with Him. Although even His love for us is hard to fathom, there is so much more beyond our brain capacity. He does not only deal with humans. To think so is to limit Him. Just as the sun has all those "millions of" statistics, so God has qualities beyond our comprehension, a greatness beyond human fathomings and dealings.

When we meet Him face to face, which will overwhelm us more: the power of His love for us measily little humans or the awesome power He has beyond our scope of understanding?