Ten Days Staring at Nothing

In December 1995, Robert Williams, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, made a decision his colleagues called reckless. He pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a tiny patch of sky in the constellation Ursa Major — a spot that appeared completely empty to ground-based telescopes. The area was no larger than a grain of sand held at arm's length. Williams used his director's discretionary time to authorize the observation, and for ten consecutive days, from December 18 to 28, Hubble gathered light from that dark sliver of nothing.

When the 342 exposures were assembled into a single image, the astronomy community went silent. That supposed emptiness contained roughly three thousand galaxies — spirals, ellipticals, irregular smudges of light — some dating back to when the universe was less than a billion years old. Each galaxy held hundreds of billions of stars. And this was just one tiny grain of sand's worth of sky.

The psalmist wrote, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands." David saw this declaration with naked eyes and a shepherd's wonder. We needed a billion-dollar telescope and ten days of patience to glimpse what he already knew — that the Creator filled even the emptiest-looking corners of the cosmos with staggering abundance.

If God lavished that much creative power on a patch of sky no one was watching, imagine the attention He gives to the life He is shaping in you.