But when I reached the Gospels, everything changed. I quickly realized this book is about a Person who made the celestial heavens - including that great galaxy of Andromeda, and the earth - and me.īecause I had no reference points when I read the Bible, it wasn’t just Leviticus that confused me. A universe one hundred billion light-years across, containing countless trillions of stars, and the Bible makes them sound like a casual add-on! And then I read verse 16, the greatest understatement ever: “He made the stars also” (NASB). One night several years later, I opened a Bible and saw these words for the first time: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. As Romans 1 says, I was seeing in what he had made “his invisible attributes. Unknown to me, God was using the wonders of the universe to draw me to himself. I wept because I felt so incredibly small.
I wanted to worship, but I didn’t know whom.
My wonder was trumped by an unbearable sense of loneliness and separation. I longed to go there and explore its wonders and lose myself in something greater than myself. One night I discovered the great galaxy of Andromeda, with its trillion stars, 2.5 million light-years away. I’d study the stars and planets and every clear night gaze at them for hours through my telescope. I yearned for something bigger than myself.
Comic books and science fiction were my escape. Though I seemed okay on the outside, inside I felt a gnawing emptiness. My parents had both been divorced, and their fights left me worried that another was on its way. My dad was a tavern owner who despised Christians in general and pastors in particular. This message was given at the 2013 National Conference and appears as a chapter in The Romantic Rationalist: God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C.S.
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