What Hides in the Darkness

In 1995, astronomer Robert Williams made a daring decision. He pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at what appeared to be the emptiest, most unremarkable patch of night sky — a spot near the Big Dipper no larger than a grain of sand held at arm's length. Many colleagues thought he was wasting precious telescope time on nothing.

After ten days of exposure, the images came back. That tiny, "empty" patch of darkness contained over three thousand galaxies — each one home to hundreds of billions of stars. Later, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field revealed ten thousand galaxies in an even smaller slice of sky.

What looked like nothing turned out to hold more than anyone could fathom.

Humility works the same way. We look at our own understanding — our theology, our plans, our carefully constructed view of the world — and we assume we have mapped it all. But the God who scattered ten thousand galaxies into a pinpoint of darkness is always larger than our lens can capture.

The Psalmist understood this: "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 is not thinking less of yourself. It is standing before the vastness of the Almighty's creation and realizing how much beauty, mystery, and glory lies beyond what you can see — then worshipping anyway.