What's Visible...And What's Not

The next time you're outside at night in a fairly dark location look up at the sky and try counting the stars you see. You might be able to see 2-3000. If you have binoculars you'll see a few more stars and even more if you have a small telescope - perhaps double the number you can see with the naked eye. Still, you're only seeing 5-6,000 of the stars overhead.

Meanwhile, there are some 200 billion (with a "b") stars in our galaxy alone, and billions of galaxies out there. That means that even using a telescope you can only see a tiny fraction of the stars in the sky. Even astronomers using all their technical equipment and super telescopes have only seen a small number of the stars in our galaxy (not to mention all the planets, satellites, moons, comets, and asteroids zooming around up there).

I was thinking about how this the other night - and again the next day when I looked up into a blue sky during daytime and I realized the stars were still up there shining only I couldn't see them because it was light out. I was pondering this in light of some things going on in my life where I had to admit that, like the "unseen but definitely up there" stars above, there were doubtless many things going on in that particular situation that I simply wasn't seeing.

Are you following me? You and I stumble through life and all the experiences we have, interactions with people, etc.... and we often ask ourselves, "I wonder why she/he did that?" Then we draw conclusions about people's behavior based on what we think is going on. But like the stars in their courses above us, there is always more to a situation than meets the eye. In fact, I would argue that even in situations involving just us, we aren't fully aware of what is going on because our own personal motives escape us at times.

Like most things I speculate on here, I really don't have a solution. I do believe it is helpful to at least acknowledge that there are things going on - unseen things - that we are unaware of in any situation we find ourselves involved in. That means we should give others a little slack. It wouldn't hurt to cut ourselves a little slack from time-to-time as well. Perhaps that's why there is so much emphasis on grace and forgiveness in the Bible. God knows we need heaping helpings of both in order to make it down here on planet earth.