Thursday, January 1, 2009

Look Up.

One of the many, many side benefits that comes from moving your entire family to Uganda to adopt a child (which I'm doing, if you didn't already know), is that Jinja's lack of light pollution (the entire town pretty much goes dark when the sun goes down) means I will be able to be free to pursue one of my favorite pastimes: stargazing.

I love space. In fact, I'm such a dork, I have NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" website bookmarked, and I check it every day (Yes, my gmail account, CNN.com, and the APOD are my three daily stops on the internet). I don't understand a lot of the technical stuff about space, and I'm having difficulty reconciling scientific estimates of the age of the universe with my evangelical Christian upbringing, but there's just something about looking upward that causes me to look inward.

It's comforting, oddly enough, to think that all this crazy stuff is going on out there, far away from my travails and triumphs, and simultaneously realize that I'm both very, very small and very, very loved.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. Take some time over the next 365 nights to look up and wonder.

2 comments:

Melissa said...

Have you watched the star of bethlehem...you would love it

Anonymous said...

I have heard Dr. Chuck Missler say things about the speed of light not always being the same as what it is today and reconciling the age of the universe with the Bible. (I'm sure I'm botching the explanation.) His website is www.khouse.org Also, I know he gets a lot of his science info from Dr. Gerald Schroeder, so you may check out his books.

Shannon