Eclipse

Photo credit to Mark Barsarab.

The heavens declare the glory of God,

And the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

-Psalm 19:1

I hope that, if you so happened to have the chance today, that you watched the eclipse.

If you didn’t…dang. You missed out.

The heavens declare the glory of God,

And the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

-Psalm 19:1

This morning in Spanish class that was one of our verses, and the teacher said it was perfect for the eclipse. But to be honest, I wasn’t all that excited for the eclipse, even though I’m the astronomer of the family, always dragging out my telescope during the summer and setting it up during family gatherings so I can help the little kids look at the moon, always going out in the backyard at unholy hours to stargaze, always talking and thinking about the sheer vastness of space and time.

Even so, I wasn’t excited. But when I slid those paper glasses onto my face for the first time and looked up to see the sun with a big black hole in the side…It finally dawned on me how incredible this was.

Wow, God. Wow. You did this.

So naturally, the words I literally yelled to myself were,

“THIS IS SICK!”

Profound, I know. I’m like that sometimes.

I photographed the sun as the eclipse started by putting a pair of glasses over a phone camera lens. You can't see the moon, but it still came out looking neat.

So my neighbor, siblings, parents and I sat on the driveway, swapped stories, ate cookies, and listened to the Interstellar soundtrack (particularly Cornfield Chase, one of the coolest songs known to mankind) while we watched the last sonar eclipse of our mid-western generation and the last of many more generations to come. 

I almost wasted my afternoon doing something else. Geometry. Screens. Even writing. I would have missed out on something incredible, miraculous, beautiful, wondrous.

There’s something so, so amazing about what happened today. The moon, the literal moon, went in front of the sun, the literal sun. Doesn’t that make you stop, pause, and remember your smallness? Your comforting insignificance? Your purpose in the bigger picture, the bigger story? 

When I set that telescope up in the yard and tilted it just right, and carefully let all the little kids look through it at the moon last summer, they all had something in common.

What did they have in common? A strange sense of awe.

I could see it, creeping into their eyes, into their huge smiles, into their voices as they whispered, “Wow” and stared until their eyes watered.

My dear friend, God made this beauty for you. He wants you to pause. To take the time to smile, to enjoy it, to whisper wow. As a teacher I know put it, he’s like a Great Father who made you a big breakfast of bacon, pancakes, scrambled eggs and orange juice, and he’s smiling at the head of the table, waiting for you to take your seat and dig in.

Will you really skip over that breakfast with that patient, loving Father for a quick bowl of sugary cereal?

That’s what we do most of the time.

Today I want to ask if you took time out of your day to watch a miracle.

And if you didn’t, will you take the time in the future? When the next miracle comes along, will you stop, and watch, and smile? 

Your Father is waiting for you at the table, and he’s piled your plate with more wonderful things than you can possibly imagine. 

Take your seat, dig in, and say, Wow.