A devotional from Sam Woodrum

In college, I took an entry level astronomy class that consistently blew my mind. I naively thought, “it’ll be cool to learn all the constellations.” Turns out, we barely skimmed over constellations during one lab. The material was actually much more about physics: the way all the parts of our unfathomably large universe moved and interacted. The Earth was a tiny part of this big picture, and the constellations were really just a flat interpretation of the vast world beyond… an interpretation which wouldn’t fit if you were looking out from any other spot in the universe. My uninformed idea of what astronomy was all about was limited to my own perspective, as if I was the center of the universe. When I read “the Lord has made his light shine upon us” in Psalm 118 my initial naive/self-centered reaction was, “well, it doesn’t always feel that way… where was that light when ____.” But when I remember the paradigm shift from my class, I think about how after sunset it seems like the sun has disappeared. Broadening our perspective just a bit shows us that obviously the fiery sun is still lighting and warming the Earth, it just can’t be seen from where we’re sitting at the moment. In this season, I pray for perspective on those dark nights.