What if we could feel the speed of the earth as it spun beneath our feet?
Feel the wind as it really is,
the scent of the sky and our atmosphere as it all passed us by.
Feel the danger and the exhilaration of all the motion,
but yet be held still and in place, feet firmly glued to the ground.
I’m sure we would all be wondering what brand of superglue our God uses.
And if it's sold at Wal-Mart.
There’s a song that I’m certain anyone who has set foot in a church has sung or heard a choir of heart-stoppingly adorable kids sing at some point.
He’s got the whole world in his hands.
Sound familiar?
Whenever I’ve heard or sung this song, I’ve always had this image in my head of two cupped hands with a beautiful little green and blue ball sitting in them (and I’m pretty sure there have been loads of drawings of this too). The earth sitting peacefully in the hands of God.
But the earth doesn’t actually sit motionless and calm in the universe. I’m not going to even try to go into the math of it all, but we all know that our little ball of life is doing some pretty crazy acrobatics as it spins with eight other planets (I refuse to renounce Pluto as a planet) around a literal ball of fire. I don’t know about you, but the picture in my head changes quite a bit when I think about the same two hands holding the earth as it moves along its course.
Whilst the deeper meaning of our song is not that there are two literal hands that the earth is sitting on but rather that God has complete control of everything, the distinction is still crucial. It would be magnificent enough that our God has control of the earth if it was a calm little ball just hanging out in space. That would still be over 6 billion people for God to lead and know intimately, which is a mighty thing in itself. But oh how it further increases the might and glory and wonder of our God to know that he doesn’t need silence or calm to remain in control of everything. In the midst of the chaos and the noise and the war and the tears, our God is forever the almighty Lord of the heavens and the earth who knows everything there could be to know about the lives that we all weave around each other. And this incomprehensible God that holds the earth and all our lives inside of his perfect will—to him alone be all the glory.
