Day 4
Read Psalm 8
I spent two summers working at Glacier National Park in northern Montana. One summer I worked as an assistant manager at a camp store and the other as a bellhop. But the jobs were just an excuse to have the most beautiful place on earth as my backyard. I hiked over 750 miles of trail in those two summers. Glacier is remote, there is only one road that traverses through the park, and on a multi-night backpacking trip you can get about as far away from any natural light source as you can anywhere else in the continental US. The night sky is overwhelming. I would lay in my sleeping bag with my head outside the tent and would never grow tired of staring at the sky. Some of the stars seemed close enough to touch.
I memorized Psalm 8 that first summer and I would recite it when I was at the top of a mountain or before I went to bed looking up at the stars. “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth.” I can imagine David doing the same after climbing a mountain in Israel. We know David was a shepherd, but I am willing to bet he spent a lot of his youth exploring the mountains and a lot of nights looking up at the stars in wonder.
David’s question in verses 3-4 is a question we should never cease to ask. “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what are humans that you are mindful of them, the son of man that you care for him?” I remember hearing about a space probe that NASA sent to Pluto a few years ago that was going to collect information about the small planet (I guess it is no longer a planet anymore), but it was going to take about 8 years for this probe to travel to Pluto and send the information back. That is how far Pluto is from the earth, an 8 year trip. And that is just the size of our own galaxy. And yet, in spite of the vastness of His creation, God is “mindful of us.” And not just mindful of us, but committed to us to the extent that He became one of us. As Paul says in 2nd Corinthians, in Christ “God was reconciling the world to Himself.”
Prayer
Spend some time today thinking about how big God’s world is and the wonderful good news that He cares about each of us.
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