Have you been following the story of NASA’s mission to Pluto? A spacecraft named New Horizons that left earth on January 19, 2006 just reached Pluto this month. Scientists are eagerly devouring new images and data from this ninth rock from the sun. As one writer put it, the trickle of data “has been enough to completely overthrow our theories of what we expected to find at the icy little world and its family of moons.” New information is leading to new questions faster than you can say “To be or not to be a planet? That is the question.”
Something similar happens as we grow in our knowledge of God. Please don’t misunderstand me: God is indeed the supreme “Self-Revelator,” as Mom writes in the poem below. We can indeed know him and his ways meaningfully. And we are fully responsible for that knowledge. But we will never know him completely. And that is good. To imagine otherwise is folly.
Here is Mom’s poem for the month. Read and worship.
INFINITUDE
The farther the telescopes search through the blackness,
The vaster the universe left to explore.
Space endlessly stretches, star-studded and trackless,
As much as we fathom, there always is more.
We dissect life’s building blocks, minute, invisible,
Peer with a microscope, ponder and probe.
Still vainly we seek for the one indivisible—
Particles spinning, each atom a globe.
The longer we gaze at the matchless Creator,
The greater the vistas awaiting our view—
The incomprehensible Self-Revelator
Whose mercies and mysteries each morning are new.
We love Him, the intimate Friend of our spirit,
His rays undetected by human device,
His being unfathomed although we’re so near it:
To know Him—eternity will not suffice.
—Elaine Gingrich, April 1986
For the rest of the poems in this monthly series, see here.
And if you enjoyed this poem, leave a comment here for Mom, or send her an email at
. Thanks!
