When the Darkness Is Full of Light

In 1995, astronomer Robert Williams made a decision his colleagues called reckless. He pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a tiny patch of sky near the Big Dipper — a sliver of darkness no larger than a grain of sand held at arm's length — and kept the shutter open for ten consecutive days. Other scientists protested. That patch looked completely empty. Why waste hundreds of hours of precious telescope time staring at nothing?

When the exposure finally developed, it silenced every critic. That "empty" darkness contained over three thousand galaxies. Not stars — galaxies. Each one holding billions of stars of its own. What looked like nothing to the naked eye was, in fact, a cathedral of light too distant for us to perceive.

The psalmist wrote, "Even the darkness is not dark to You; the night is as bright as the day" (Psalm 139:12). God has always known what Robert Williams discovered that year — that darkness is not the same thing as emptiness.

When you are walking through a season where you cannot see a single point of light, when grief or illness or uncertainty has narrowed your world to a tiny, dark patch of sky, the Hubble Deep Field whispers something the Spirit has been saying all along: just because you cannot see what the Almighty is doing does not mean He is doing nothing. The light is there. It has always been there. You simply need a longer exposure.