Fully Deployed Before Launch
The James Webb Space Telescope
Psalm 90:16
Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
John 1:14
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Words of Grace For Today
There are life altering moments for us humans. If we are blessed they will be moments that givec us life, instead of rob life from us. Astronauts, and even space tourists, say that being in space and seeing back to earth and out into the deep of space changes everything about how they see life on earth, how they see everything.
The James Webb Space Telescope is in orbit, looking further than any other telescope has been able to. And ‘further’ means it sees back in time. That is, the light that it can see has travelled light years upon light years before arriving at the telescope. That same light could come to us if we sat in space orbit with the new telescope, though we are unable to see that minuscule particle-waves of light among the brighter and closer sources of light. We can see light from galaxies about a million years back in time with our bare eyes. The Hubble telescope can see 10-15 billion light years back in time, which is back to what we believe is the beginning of light, the beginning of the universe, the big bang. The Webb Telescope is designed to be more flexible than the Hubble, and is designed to see the first million or so light years starting with the big bang. In the beginning ….
We may need telescopes to see ‘far out there’. We need no instruments to see the work, power, life, glory, grace and truth of the creator of the universe. For that we need faith, and that is always a gift, only a gift, from God.
Once we see God’s work, power, life, glory, grace and truth, life for us is never the same. That is the most fundamental, profound life-altering experience there is. We usually allow the poignancy of that experience to fade and meld into the myriad of experiences, though that altering element never quite goes away. It’s like a mark on our skin that changes and morphs over time, but never goes away. The liver spot on my wrist below my thumb appeared as a tiny, barely perceptible dot in my 20’s, grew to be more obvious in my 40’s and by my 50’s had grown to more than a half inch across. It keeps growing. Faith, the gift of faith, grows on us in quite a similar manner, unless we take rash measures to cut it out, like a surgeon’s knife excising a malignant mole.
It would not be the first effort, were we to try and build a faith-generating ‘telescope’, so that we could see back into the beginning of time to see God create this whole thing we call the universe. Humans have tried to ‘create’ or control faith since the beginning of our time. It’s always a futile effort, destroying more of life than it gives to anyone.
So we today we continue to pray: Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
And we remember that Word that created the universe became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
For this we give God thanks, unending thanks.