“The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth, and their utterances to the end of the world.” — Psalms 19:1-4

How magnificent the splendor of the night sky! How marvelous the vast array of heavenly bodies so propitiously placed to adorn that moment in our day when darkness reigns! There is a wondrous universe about us that brings us to a place of unquestionable humility when we consider the vastness of such an immeasurable quantity.

We live in the outer suburbs of the Milky Way Galaxy on the Third Planet orbiting the Sun, which is but a single star out of 200 billion stars within our small neighborhood we call our Milky Way Galaxy. How quickly, in one sentence we say, what is so incredibly vast to consider and understand! Our orbit around the sun is on the average some 92 million miles away from the scorching ball of fire we call our sun; a broiling cauldron of continuously exploding hydrogen bombs. Yet, the light from that magnificent ball of fire is the source of energy that sustains life on earth, because its distance is exactly right for water to exist in liquid form. But, the distance is so vast, that it is hard for us to capture, when we simply say it is 93 million miles away.

Light travels at the incredible speed of 186,283 miles per second. If I were to shoot a bullet at the speed of light around the world, it would go through my head, at least three times before I could duck and yet it takes over 8 minutes for the light that leaves the surface of the sun to reach our planet. If our sun would turn off, it would take some 8 and three-quarter minutes for us to find out. Astronomers call this distance between the sun and the Earth, an Astronomical Unit (AU).