The Star You Never See at Night

On a clear night in the high desert of New Mexico, you can see roughly five thousand stars. But there is one star you never see at night — the one that matters most. Our sun, burning at twenty-seven million degrees at its core, does something remarkable: it holds everything in place.

Remove the sun, and within eight minutes — the time it takes light to travel ninety-three million miles — Earth would begin drifting into the void at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour. Jupiter, Saturn, every planet and moon would scatter like marbles off a table. The solar system would not explode. It would simply dissolve — because the center that held everything in its beautiful, ordered dance had vanished.

Paul tells the Colossians that Christ "is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." Just as our sun is both the light that makes life visible and the gravitational center keeping eight planets in orbit, Christ is the One through whom all creation finds its meaning and its coherence. He is the image of the invisible God — the One who makes the unseen Father knowable, tangible, near.

Every sunrise preaches a quiet sermon. There is a Center that holds. There is a Light that reveals. And apart from Him, everything flies apart into cold and darkness.