Godsmacked pt. 2

Twinkle, twinkle lots of stars.

I'm a city dweller. I love broad streets and coffee shops, smooth pavements and signposts. They make life comfortable, easy and liveable.

Coffee shops are great and make getting coffee so much easier than having to do things yourself.  Saying, "A weak, skinny, vanilla latte with a shot of cold milk please," takes a fraction of the time, and is nowhere near as tedious, as planting a tree, waiting for it to grow, harvesting the beans, roasting them, grinding them, and of course not forgetting buying a calf, feeding it, watching it grow, learning to milk the cow, getting the milk from said cow, pasteurising it etc. I could go on about the vanilla beans and the processes involved in cultivating the orchids but I know nothing about that.

Smooth pavements are nice, they make moving around easier, as do signposts, they show you where you are going and help you not get lost. Trees don't perform this vital function, as they point in many and varied directions and don't have any wording or distances written on them, they look pretty but as a directional marker they are useless.

But I have not always lived in suburbia, I used to hear the sound of cows and sheep outside my window but now I hear the noise of traffic, car alarms and people. Little birds used to wake me up with their gentle song but that was a long time ago now it's big machines and the next door neighbours fighting.

Nights for me are now well lit, with street lamps and head lights, I no longer stumble blindly through dark fields hoping I don't follow Alice down some rabbit hole.

I like street lights and seeing where I am going but the dark does have some advantages...stars being one of them. Stars are Godsmacking in their own right, they need no help. They are unfathomably far away, some of them are larger than most of us can possibly imagine, others are so far away that they will have ceased to have exist by the time we see their light, the stars are truly amazing, Godsmacking. What we, light loving, city dwellers don't understand is that we only see a fraction of them. Get out to the countryside, wait for it to go really dark and all of a sudden the night sky isn't just dotted with one or two hundred stars, it is covered in billions of them! And there are other things too, if it's dark enough you can see the Milky Way, and if you know where to look you can see that there are planets, with patience you can even track satellites and watch for those elusive shooting stars we hear about so often in really tacky, love songs sung by really bad 80's bands.

It was on a night such, years ago that I was lying on a beach in Tresaith, Mid Wales, leading a youth Camp in an elipog (that's epilogue to you) and I was Gobsmacked, completely, again, totally by surprise. There were 20 or so youngsters (14 - 18 year olds) lying on the beach gazing up at the sky. "Why?" I hear you scream into your coffee, the one you got from a coffee shop and not one you made from scratch yourself.

Each of these youngsters was trying to count the stars in a certain section of the sky. Every so often a voice would cry, "50", because someone had counted 50 stars. These numbers were noted and we were up in the several thousands when God reached down from Heaven, grabbed me by the mind, shook me violently and went off laughing loudly at my confusion. The whole elipog I had prepared drained from my now shaken and confused brain and all I could was remember the two verses from the Psalms. (As I said last time I didn't know where the verses were but I've looked them up and they are Psalm 147 v 4 & 5.)

"He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit."

Twenty of us took about 35 minutes to get up to about 8000 stars and all of us agreed that there were a few more than that. God knows them all by name, not just our 8000 but the billions we never got to, indeed his understanding is beyond our measure.