I wrote this poem March 15, 2003. I have always been fascinated and amazed by the sheer massiveness of the stars and galaxies. I was even more amazed in the introduction to chemistry in college when we learned about atoms. I had learned about them in science class previously, and I remember learning in elementary that the atoms in one grain of sand were more numerous than all the leaves on all the trees in the world. In college, our textbook said that if you were to expand an atom to the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be the size of the period at the end of this sentence. I forget how many tons the nucleus would weigh. The electrons that orbit the nucleus are even smaller! Stars and electrons, despite their massive distance in size, both mindbogglingly gigantic and mindbogglingly microscopic, have a lot in common.
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| NGC 4414, a galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices Image by NASA |
Titanic balls of fire
Placed by God in the heavens
Mere specks in His eyes
They glow in the sky
Far larger than I can imagine
How is it that the God who is so much larger than the stars
Can care for me -
One who is a mere speck
Compared to the stars?
The stars orbit in an endless round
In their clusters and galaxies they orbit
And the God who made these galaxies
Huge beyond my imagination
Cared enough to send His only Son
To die for me!
Tiny balls of matter
Placed by God in the atoms
So much smaller than specks in our eyes
So much tinier than we could begin to imagine
Electrons orbit in an endless round
In large numbers they orbit
Around the nucleus of the atom
The atom - like a galaxy to the electron
And how many atoms are in a single cell?
Countless millions of atoms in a single grain of sand!
How is it that the God who created the unimaginably humongous galaxies
Also created the unimaginably tiny electrons?
What a wonder
That such an amazing Creator God
Could care enough
To send His only Son
To die on a cross for me!
