The Telescope Maker of Mount Wilson

In 1917, George Ellery Hale stood beneath the newly completed 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California. For years, he had battled skeptics who said a mirror that large could never be ground with sufficient precision. But Hale believed that the God who flung galaxies into the void had also given human hands the patience to polish glass one thousandth of an inch at a time.

When astronomers first turned that great eye skyward, they discovered something staggering — the Milky Way was not the whole universe. There were other galaxies, billions of them, stretching out beyond anything anyone had imagined. The cosmos was not smaller than we thought. It was incomprehensibly larger.

Psalm 139 reads like a man standing at his own telescope, overwhelmed not by distant galaxies but by the nearness of God. David looks inward and finds that the Almighty has already been there — searching, knowing, hemming him in behind and before. He looks back to his mother's womb and discovers that El Shaddai was weaving him together in the dark, every cell accounted for, every day written before a single one came to pass.

Hale's telescope revealed a universe too vast to measure. David's psalm reveals a God too intimate to escape. The same One who holds a hundred billion galaxies in His hand knew you before your first heartbeat — and His thoughts toward you outnumber the sand.