What a Grain of Sand Revealed

In 1995, astronomer Robert Williams made a decision that his colleagues thought was a waste of precious telescope time. He pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a tiny patch of sky that appeared completely empty — a dark sliver no larger than a grain of sand held at arm's length. Then he kept the shutter open for ten consecutive days.

What came back silenced every critic. That seemingly blank fragment of sky contained nearly three thousand galaxies, each one home to hundreds of billions of stars. The image, now known as the Hubble Deep Field, revealed that what we had dismissed as nothing was, in fact, everything — a cathedral of light hidden behind our assumptions.

There is a sermon in that photograph. We look at the universe and instinctively place ourselves at the center. We measure importance by what is visible, impressive, loud. But the God who scattered those galaxies into a speck of darkness we couldn't even see is the same God who tells us that the last shall be first, that power is made perfect in weakness, that the greatest among us must become a servant.

The Psalmist understood. "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).

True humility isn't thinking less of yourself. It is standing before the Hubble Deep Field and realizing that the Almighty, who flung ten thousand galaxies into a grain of sand, still knows your name.