The Pale Blue Dot

On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned its camera back toward home from 3.7 billion miles away. The photograph it captured shows Earth as a tiny speck — less than a single pixel — suspended in a beam of scattered sunlight. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who had requested the image, wrote that every king and peasant, every saint and sinner, every young couple in love lived out their lives on that "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

The psalmist arrived at the same breathtaking conclusion three thousand years earlier. "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?" The observable universe contains roughly two trillion galaxies. Our sun is one ordinary star among two hundred billion in the Milky Way alone. And there we are — a fraction of a pixel.

But here is what makes the Christian story so staggering. The God who flung those two trillion galaxies into existence knows the number of hairs on your head. He does not love you because you are large. He loves you because He is.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is standing in the full honesty of your smallness and discovering, to your astonishment, that the Almighty has written your name on His hand.