The Mind-Blowing Love of God

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but the best ones are those who render you almost speechless.  I rediscovered one of those today.

I am a collector of pictures, most notably pictures of the natural world.  Some are those that I have taken myself, but also many from other sources.  I keep these pictures on my computer and use them as my desktop background.  Since I have quite a few, I change my background on a regular basis.  As I was deciding what my next change was going to be I found a picture of a spiral galaxy tucked away in one of my folders.  This got me thinking along the lines of astronomical pictures.  I did a search for this kind of pictures and came to a rather reliable source for good astronomical pictures, the site for the Hubble Space Telescope aptly named hubblesite.org.  Naturally I found a number of good pictures, but there was one that every time I see it blows my mind.

The title of the photo is rather mundane (it's called "The Hubble Deep Field North"), but what is in the picture is anything but mundane.  The caption states,

About 1,500 galaxies are visible in this deep view of the universe, taken by allowing the Hubble Space Telescope to stare at the same tiny patch of sky for 10 consecutive days in 1995. The image covers an area of sky only about width of a dime viewed from 75 feet away.

Take a look for yourself and keep in mind that practically every speck you see is not merely a star, but rather a galaxy of stars.


Source: Hubblesite.org

Here's a brief video on how the picture was taken.


Here are two points that stood out to me.

• There are galaxies in the picture which are 12 billion light years away (a light year is approx. 6 trillion miles).  A billion times a trillion is a very large number.
• Each of the approx. 1,500 galaxies can consist of 1-100 billion stars.
• Also remember that this is from a piece of the sky smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

As your mind is already straining to comprehend the size of it all, let me throw this fact at you.  The same God Who created and cares for all of this would have emptied Himself to save you if you were the only one who needed saving.

Behold the mind-blowing love of God.