Tuesday, April 13, 2010

All in the Perspective

My granddaughter, Kayla, a 12-year-old MK (missionary kid) living in Swaziland, is home schooled. She sent me the following essay. See if it blesses you as much as it blessed me. (copied here just as she wrote it.)


The Neighborhood Beyond Our Atmosphere


God has made a massive universe that I just love to learn about. So today I’m going to share my interest with you. There are many so many things I could share with you about space. It has more to study than if I lived 1,000 lives, doing nothing but studding the universe, I still would get only a tiny fraction of it. So I will tell you today about the distance between our neighboring heavenly bodies and our earth.

Our solar system is centered around the sun. The sun is a pretty little star compared to the others in our galaxy. We are 93,000,000 miles away from the sun. Mercury is 36 million miles away from the sun, Venus is 67.2 million miles, Mars is 141.6 million miles, Jupiter is 483.6 million miles, Saturn is 870 million miles, Uranus is 1.78 billion miles, Neptune is 2.8 billion miles, and Pluto is 3.6 billion miles away.

The distance between us and the stars in our universe is amazing. Proxima Centauri, the second farthest star from earth, is 25 trillion miles away from earth. Now warp your mind around d this. Betelgeuse in Orion is 520 light years away! 1 light year is 6 trillion miles! You do the math. Yeah, we’re small.

The distance between us and the Andromeda galaxy is 2.9 million light years away. We are extremely tiny. Yet, “For God so loved the world that He gave us His only begotten son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16” He loves us! Tiny literally whiney, microscopic specs and this scale, He talks about us and cares about our problems. Can we just thank Him for loving us? Can just we surrender our lives to Him?