Pointing the Telescope at Nothing

In 1995, astronomer Robert Williams made a decision that his colleagues thought was reckless. As director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, he pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a tiny patch of sky that appeared completely empty — a dark sliver near the Big Dipper no larger than a grain of sand held at arm's length. He aimed humanity's most powerful eye at what looked like nothing and kept the shutter open for ten days.

What came back changed our understanding of the universe. That seemingly empty patch of darkness contained over three thousand galaxies, each holding hundreds of billions of stars. The Hubble Deep Field image revealed that what we had dismissed as void was, in fact, unimaginably full.

Faith works the same way. The writer of Hebrews tells us that faith is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." When we trust the Almighty with a season that looks empty — a prayer that seems to hit the ceiling, a calling that makes no sense, a wait that stretches beyond our patience — we are pointing our lives at what appears to be nothing.

But God does not waste dark patches. The emptiness we see is not absence. It is abundance we have not yet developed the eyes to perceive.

Robert Williams risked his professional reputation on a hunch that the darkness was worth investigating. Faith asks something similar of us: look longer at the places where you see nothing, and trust that the God who filled the cosmos with hidden galaxies has filled your future too.