Vast!

            As I prepare for vacation next week, I’ve reflected on the vastness of Lake Michigan, where we’re going to relax. Statistics don’t lodge in my mind for very long, so I can’t impress you with the number of gallons of water in the lake, the dimensions, or the location of sunken ships that lie at the bottom of the unpredictable body of water. If you’ve seen it, you know; if you haven’t, believe me—or a map—it’s vast.

            Huge though the lake may be, I thought, my mind rabbit trailing, it’s diminished by its Creator in vastness.   God is vast! Surprise! But how often do we think about it? “God is great and God is good,” we recited as children. Stop just a minute. Great? Or vast? What does that mean?

 To me our earth is so big, but it’s only a speck in the universe.  Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. My brain hurts to even think about that, let alone light years and multiple galaxies. Yet our God is so much bigger in power, majesty, and glory. And what about the things that are impossible to quantify like his grace, love, patience, and mercy? I remember an old hymn that says: “There a wideness in God’s mercy, Like the wideness of the sea.” The words could easily be rewritten to say:  “There is a vastness .”

           

             The other night as I wrote in my prayer journal I tried to find words of vastness that further describe God. It didn’t take me long because I ran out; language failed me. Even if my vocabulary were more like my husband’s, there still wouldn’t be enough, because how does anyone truly define the enormous, vast majesty of our God? We can’t.

            In high school I studied Latin for two years. Each Friday Miss Walters led our class in a study of Roman mythology, an excellent way to learn about culture and prepare us for myriads of literary allusions we would encounter in our college studies. Fridays weren’t my favorite Latin days, although they spared me the agony of oral translation! I didn’t like the Roman gods. They were capricious, vindictive, and vain, to name just a few of their unappealing qualities. They were as flawed as humans, only they had superhuman powers. You couldn’t count on them. You never knew when you might cross them, or some fickle game they played might make you a pawn. They weren’t the “same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8, NIV) like someone else I know.

            I’m neither a scientist nor a theologian, but as I lounge by the lake, the waves of God’s vastness will lap the shore of my mind and remind me once again that He is great! 

Thanks for reading “Faithful Thoughts.” Please visit with me again in a week.