I was chatting with my son this morning about a problem he was facing and our conversation inspired this article.
You see I was sharing with my son something that I do when I feel life is a little tough and I’m feeling challenged by something.
I told him how I go out onto the balcony of our house at night and I look up into the night sky at the stars. I told him how in the night sky there are shimmering stars and static stars. The stars that don’t shimmer are planets reflecting the light of our sun. However the shimmering ones are other suns in our galaxy just like ours. Yep, tiny little balls of fire that are all burning themselves out.
There are estimates that within our galaxy alone, there are over 200 billion suns just like ours. Some of them have little balls of dust floating around them just like ours does (Yes, I’m talking about planet Earth). Now on one of those little balls of dust, floating around one of those 200 billion tiny sparks in our galaxy, is you and me.
Here’s the amazing thing with this, there are estimated to be over 100 billion galaxies in our Universe. So 100 billion galaxies, with each of them possibly 200 billion suns. How many tiny balls of dust called a planet does that make?
It gets even more fascinating. Some of those suns, by the time their light from the flames gets within our eye sight, have already burnt out and don’t exist any more. Just like a spark that jumps out of the log, fire burns out in due time as the energy has been expended. The light is still travelling, and yet the source of the light is no longer there.
WOW!
He looked at me with fascination and it dawned on him how small and how short-lived all this is. I said to him that out of all the dust balls we have been able to observe with our Hubble Space telescope, we haven’t seen one yet that has butterflies, trees, waterfalls, birds, beaches, art work, movies, animals and human beings like ours yet. Out of billions of them, not one has this rich beauty.
Isn’t that amazing???
I told him how it's such a gift to be here right now, in this moment. It won’t last, our sun will burn out and our dust ball will be sucked into the vacuum of the black hole. This is the golden jackpot that we are here now, in the billions of human years, me and you son, are here right now.
What a gift.
Interestingly enough, after that his problem didn’t seem to be as big an issue any more.
