More Than An Ocean

Awakening to the Reality of a Cosmically-Sized Love

There is something I learned when navigating through the vast wasteland of car-sized boulders at 12,750 feet while making my way up the final ascent to Long’s Peak in Colorado.

People are less than microscopic.

As we climbed and then turned back to survey the boulder field, 1000-feet below us, our tents had become colored dots in a broken sea of browns.

Above the Boulderfield. Also, see man in the red shirt in the bottom left corner.

After hitting the summit, we looked down again. Our tents were submerged. The people had drowned in its vastness. The car-sized boulders had become bits of sand washed by the enormity of the figurative waves.

On top of Long’s Peak looking down. Tents no longer visible.

That’s as descriptive as I can get in conveying how relatively microscopic a person is on a scale that we can somewhat understand. Because if you can begin to understand how insignificant we are from such a short distance on Earth, then you can appreciate our relative nothingness on a cosmic scale.

What is our size from the moon? Think about it. If you are microscopic from a few miles, what are you from 250,000 miles away?

Or, your size from Mars, which is 34 million miles away? Or, from Saturn, which is 750 million miles away? Or, from the edge of our solar system, which is nine billion miles away? For perspective, at the edge of our solar system, the Earth is no longer visible to the naked eye.

What is your size from Proxima Centauri, which is 25 trillion miles away and would take 81,000 years traveling at 35,000 miles per hour to get there. Or, from the edge of our expanding universe, which is estimated to be 46 billion times 5.8 trillion miles away?

We are nothing.

But, if we trust that this existence has been Divinely woven together in love, then is that love not larger and even more pervasive than the entire universe? How much more immense and unbounded is this love than its utter vastness and expansiveness? And if this love is that immeasurable, that unfathomable, that exhaustively immersive, where are we within it?

The truth is that there is no distance we can travel, no depth to which we can sink, no barrier behind which we can hide where that love is not inviting us into its full embrace. Imagine if that love became the center of our being.

Question

1. Spend time this week meditating on the the immense and unbounded love that surrounds you. If that love became your center, how might it begin to change how you see yourself in the world?

Peace,

Brandon