I Just Dont Understand

So I was listening to a song on my ipod the other day, actually it was while I was driving home from Purdue. The song was entitled The Letter by the band Acceptance, and there is a line in the chorus that says "..and its bringing us together.....forever." I started thinking about the word forever, and I just couldnt wrap my mind around it! Forever. That means infinate. That, my friend, I imagine, is a very long time. But think about this: infinate means that there is no beginning or end. Its just....infinate, it goes on and on and on. Our lives will go on and on and on. What does that look like? I think that the reason I cant wrap my mind around this idea of no beginning or end is because everything in our lives has a beginning and an end. We are born (the beginning), then life ends (.....the end, of course). We start a job....then we quit or retire. We start a project...then finish it. Everything has a starting and stopping point. But, according to God, our lives will go on forever with Him...if you so choose. I picture THIS life as being a blink compared to what life is ahead of us. That is impossible for me to imagine.

Tonight I went to Greek IV, which is kind of like church for greeks (no, not geeks, greeks). We watched this amazing video of some guy (Giglio was his name) giving a sort of sermon to a group of people at a concert. He started out talking about how big the universe is. He was throwing out all of these figures on the number of galaxies there are, the size of this star compared to this planet compared to this star, how many Earths fit into this star or how many light years away this galaxy is.....basically telling everyone how ginormic the universe is. Now, I love to star gaze, and I often wonder while Im laying there underneath the stars, just why the universe is so big, I lay there trying to understand the distances involved.....and I cant. So I could relate to what he was talking about. Then, just as I felt as tiny and worthless as a flea, he started talking about how special human beings are. How we are simply made from one tiny cell combining with another. Again, he was throwing out figures on how small these cells are, how long and complex a strand of DNA is, how many years it would take to read our 'code' (it was like 96 yrs), just more information about how amazingly complex things are, and how fragile and special we really are. Basically, all of this information made my head want to explode. I was actually feeling a little queezy after hearing all of that information.

But wait, he wasnt done yet. Then he started talking about laminin. Now Im sure you all know what laminin is right? Ok, I didnt know either. Laminin is a protien that holds together every single cell in your body. I suppose without laminin, we would just fall apart. Its our glue. But the interesting thing about laminin is what it looks like. Well, the pictures are posted below. If you want the link to watch the video yourself, here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1EAmfOu9lE It is kind of long, there are like 4 parts to it on youtube, but it is absolutely amazing. My summary is no where near as impacting as his message.

I do have a point to all of this though. I think that we arent meant to understand these distances or figures or complexities. If we knew a tenth of what God knows, if we knew a tenth of the truth, our tiny little peanut heads would explode. This summer while I was in Vermont, a group of us went outside during the night and laid in the middle of the dirt road, flat on our backs, and just stared at the stars. Again, as I lay there, I was trying to relate to the distances and size of the universe, and was trying to figure out the truth. So, I asked Jim why he thought God made the universe so big? Hoping to get a clever and complex response, I recieved the simple response,"just to show how big He is." I thought about it for a while, and I think that he is absolutely right. God is bigger than the biggest star in the universe, further than the furthest galaxie, brighter than the brightest light......and yet smaller than the smallest cell in the body. He is......I cant even think of a word to describe Him! Every word I think of will fall short of what Im trying to say. And with all of His hugeness and mightyness, he is still our friend. He still wants us.......just us. Astounding. Watch the video.