God > Laniakea

The backyard of the house I grew up in on Shadburn Avenue in Buford, Georgia, was huge. It was fenced all around like a baseball field and, but for a crabapple tree in one corner and a shed in the other, was clear of any obstruction. We played baseball there, my brother and I, and dreamed of making it to the bigs. I could throw a frozen rope from the Frisbee at third base to the piece of floor tile at first. But from center field, the best I could manage was a one-hopper to the plate. That yard was huge. When I was a kid.

Years later, when I was a man, I went back to visit the place. It was smaller than I expected; so much smaller that I actually drove past it the first time. The house was closer to the street than I remembered. The backyard looked like someone had laced a steel cable through the chain link and pulled it tight, drawing the fence into an impossibly small square. How anyone could have played baseball on that postage stamp of a yard baffled me. Somewhere between the Saturday morning cartoons of childhood and the April tax returns of an adult, that field of dreams grew small. I drove away feeling a little disappointed.

Most of us have experienced the kind of disappointment that rolls in like rain clouds when we return to childhood haunts. Schoolyard playgrounds seem ill equipped and tiny. Basketball gyms that loomed as big as aircraft hangars feel cramped and small. Church buildings with steeples that seemed to touch the sky look downright quaint.

We know why that happens, too. You remember those places with the perspective you had as a child when they were not only bigger than you, but bigger than life. But when you return, you see them through a larger perspective — through the eyes of an adult who has experienced things and been to places. Your childhood world didn’t shrink. You grew.

Do you think it’s possible for that to happen with God, too? When you were a kid, he seemed enormous. The things he said and did between Genesis and the maps in the back of the Bible were legendary. But as you grew, God seemed to wither. You saw more of life, experienced more of its pleasures, suffered more of its pain. And the God you knew as a child didn’t seem quite big enough to account for that pleasure or address that pain.

So now, when some emptiness within calls you to return to your faith, or some crisis drives you to reach for it, it’s sort of like going back to the old gym or playground or backyard. What seemed so significant when you were small, seems small, now that your life, with its problems and successes, has gotten so big. Except this time, it’s more serious. This time, the disappointment is with God.

May I make an observation? It could sound like an accusation, but I don’t mean it that way. I’m trying to offer an explanation — so let me frame it as a question.

Is it possible that while you grew in every other area of your life, the one area where you didn’t really mature was in your concept of God? You grew academically, physically, emotionally and relationally; but you never grew up spiritually. So now, you’re trying to handle adult issues with a child’s faith.

I know that Jesus said, Unless you become like children you cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. He was talking about the trust and complete reliance of a child, not the intellectual, conceptual understanding of children. The Bible also tells us to grow up in our faith. (Heb. 6:1; 1 Peter 2:2; Eph. 4:15)

So is God really big enough to handle whatever you bring to him? Well, let’s take something everyone would call big and use it for comparison. Our star, the Sun, is 1,392,000 kilometers around its equator. You could line up all of the planets in our solar system around the Sun’s equator three times and still have room for one Saturn, four Earths and a Mercury. Or you could fit a million Earths inside the Sun.

Those are some big numbers. But we’re just talking about one little solar system inside one galaxy. There are about 54 galaxies in our local group. Our group is part of a larger collection called the Laniakea Super Cluster. Our super cluster is 520 million light years wide and contains about 100 thousand galaxies.

The name Laniakea, by the way, is Hawaiian.

It means immeasurable heavens.

Which reminds me of something Solomon wrote. When he dedicated the Temple, in 1 Kings 8:27, he asked, Will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heavens cannot contain you. God is bigger than Laniakea.

In a corner of this vast universe, a cluster of galaxies, hundreds of thousands in number, is hurtling through space. Somewhere in that cluster, there is a group of 54 galaxies, one of which is called The Milky Way. Within that galaxy, there is a moderately-sized star, and around that star orbit a handful of planets. One of those planets is Earth.

On Earth, there are millions and millions of people.

Among all those people, there is you.

And God knows your name.