The Pale Blue Dot

In 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan persuaded NASA to do something unprecedented. As the Voyager 1 spacecraft sailed past Neptune, 3.7 billion miles from home, Sagan asked engineers to turn its camera around and photograph Earth one last time.

The resulting image stunned the world. Our entire planet — every mountain range, every ocean, every city where empires rose and fell — appeared as a faint speck of light, less than a single pixel wide, suspended in a scattered sunbeam.

Sagan reflected that the photograph should humble us, should teach us "to deal more kindly with one another." But the Psalmist arrived at the same realization three thousand years before Voyager ever launched: "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them?" (Psalm 8:3-4).

Here is the staggering paradox at the heart of our faith: the God who flung billions of miles of silent space between the planets — who scattered a hundred billion galaxies across the cosmos — chose to enter this pale blue dot as a helpless infant. The Almighty made Himself small enough to be cradled in a young mother's arms.

True humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is standing beneath a sky that vast and marveling that the One who made it all knows your name.