I walked the nearby track just after dark. I’d been busy – not just with the regular daily routines of life but with my thoughts and healing and growth. I’d faced some challenges and been distracted at times. Nothing huge was looming over or inside me, but I soon felt a perspective-check.

I looked up and noticed the bright, beautiful stars. The longer I looked up, the more stars I saw, and the more I remembered how big the sky really is. And how vast the world is. I noticed so many details, even in the dark, and I reflected on the many details of creation and the ongoing sustaining of all of those details. I feel as if I regularly notice and acknowledge the intricacies of creation, but every now and then, there are moments where the bigness of it all and the attention to details, overwhelms me. It sometimes starts small – like with a star (as if a star is actually something small) – then snowballs into so many other details. Perhaps it’s something as simple as a leaf, but the details of it and how it grows and changes start a chain of thought that then considers an insect that uses it as a home and the ways an insect survives. Then every other kind of animal and plant and how detailed their bodies are. Then there’s water, air, fire, and the way each is structured down to every molecule. How a water droplet can be so small yet the oceans are a massive combination of those droplets. How the insect takes up such little space and can go throughout it’s entire life unseen by a person or can do a bunch of damage to plants or an animal or a house. How so many living things live on earth. How the earth is just a small portion of creation. How colors and heat and light provide and are in balance most of the time. And…so much more.

Creation is big…and so very tiny. Try as we might, we can’t understand it all, explain it all, or appreciate it all. Oh, we try. We wrestle with it and argue about it. Our faith blossoms because of its vastness, or our faith dies because our pride prompts us to bring it down to a size we think we can understand and explain.

Choose to notice today – a detail or the bigness. Open your eyes and your heart to take in as much as you can. And know even when you think you are grasping as much as is possible, there is still more.