“I think it’s the emptiness. Or the straight line between the sea and the sky. Or the size of it all. I don’t know, but it does put things in perspective.” (Anita Diamont)

There’s no way to capture the “bigness” of the view with a photo. Standing on the beach, looking at the stretching shoreline, water as far as the eye can see across the horizon, and a sky dome that you can only imagine wrapping around the earth gives a glimpse of the bigness of the world. But it’s only a glimpse. How much water is there? Where do all the clouds go? How long has each grain of sand existed and where has it been every step of its journey?

We can try to answer each question scientifically, but that’s not the reason we ask the questions. We try to grasp the reality of the bigness. We think if we can explain it, we must understand it. If we understand it, we can manage or control it, at least in our own minds.

Being on the beach, looking at the bigness of the water and sky, seeing the two meet, always reminds me of perspective. The world is big. God is bigger. The potential for understanding and learning is big. God is bigger.

Acknowledging the bigness of God, admitting His authority, isn’t a weakness. Not understanding or being able to explain everything about Him isn’t a weakness. Trusting Him even when we can’t explain exactly how or why isn’t a weakness. It’s perspective.

It’s faith.

We can know a lot about God, and that familiarity grows when we seek and trust Him, but we can’t know it all. And that’s okay. There’s a lot we don’t know about the world, and we’re usually okay with it. Sometimes what we think we know isn’t as close to the truth as we want to believe. Faith is the same. We have to be willing to let God continue to teach us, continue to reveal Himself to us.

When we do, we begin to understand just how little we know and just how much more about Him we can know…and want to know.