Can you find it? The speck in the ray of light. The pale blue dot in the vastness. It’s the earth from around 4 billion miles away. Yeah I know it’s hard to see, look again. In preparing this week’s lesson from the Treasure Principle I was reminded of something I had read from Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan’s religion was the religion of Science. You can read more about him here. Here is an excerpted from a comment he made about this photo on May 11, 1996
That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
His comments humble us. They make us realize how very, very small we are. However his thoughts are only thoughts that originate in the mind of a man, not it the mind of The Eternal God. The truth is that while we are small and subjugated to the pale blue dot, THIS IS NOT OUR HOME!
As Randy Alcorn writes in his book, “Our Present life on earth is the dot. It begins. It ends. It’s brief. But from that the dot extends a line that goes on forever. That line is eternity, which Christians will spend in heaven.”
In John 14 Jesus said, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. “
Talk with God about your attitude toward the things of heaven and the things of earth. Are you living for the dot or the line? Ask him to help you make adjustments that line up your priorities with His.
