Ground for Glory

When NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope in April 1990, engineers expected the most powerful eye humanity had ever turned toward the heavens. Instead, every image came back blurred. The primary mirror — polished to what was supposed to be the most precise curvature ever achieved — was off by just 2.2 micrometers, roughly one-fiftieth the width of a human hair. That microscopic deviation from its intended design meant Hubble couldn't do what it was built to do.

For three years, the most expensive telescope in history orbited Earth, essentially nearsighted. Then in December 1993, astronauts installed COSTAR — corrective optics that compensated for the flaw. Suddenly Hubble could see. The deep-field images that followed revealed galaxies billions of light-years away and reshaped our understanding of the cosmos.

Something in that story speaks to us. We were each ground for glory — shaped by the Creator's hand for a specific purpose. But sin introduced its own subtle distortion, a deviation so small we sometimes can't even name it, yet enough to blur everything. We sense we were made for more, but the picture won't come into focus.

That's what grace does. Like COSTAR for the soul, God doesn't scrap us and start over. He corrects what's misaligned so we can finally see clearly and fulfill what we were designed for. Paul put it simply: "We are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do" (Ephesians 2:10).

You were ground for glory. Let Him bring you into focus.