Listen to the Stars

Last Sunday's issue of USA WEEKEND had a cover article called "Watch the Night Sky," which focused on the meteor shower expected to occur this Sunday and Monday during the darkest hours of the evening. I plan to spend some time out there in my backyard those nights, enjoying the show, if there is one.

As a boy I always had a fascination with astronomy, studying the various constellations,gazing at planets, viewing eclipses, and, most of all, the great meteor showers that come from time to time throughout the year.

This meteor shower will be viewed in the northeastern sky. Little fragments of a comet that fell apart long ago will enter into our atmosphere at speeds like 37 miles per second. Way down here on earth we'll see those streaking stars, and they will teach us a lesson if we are willing to listen to it.

Listen to the stars? Well, yes. It's an exciting coincidence that this Sunday's first lesson from Genesis 15 is the famous story of how Abraham saw the stars and learned about the vastness of God's love and faithfulness. He saw the very same stars that we also can see any night when we look upwards towards the heavens. Imagine that! The stars we see are the very same stars Abraham saw some 4,000 years ago!

But the meteorites that will shower our sky this weekend are quite different from the stars we hear about in the lesson from Genesis. They, too, have been around since the creation of the universe, but they only appear for a moment, and then they vanish forever. Think about that. Unlike the stars which stay in the corses, the meteorites come into our world only for a moment and then disappear forever.

Can you see the difference between the stars and the meteor showers? The showers may be exciting, even magnificent, but they are the end of something that was and never will be again. The stars, however, remind me that God's promises are forever. We can cling to those and we can find hope in them if we will resist the tempatatiom tp focus on the ephemeral. Yet even the stars will not last forever. Only God who created them all endures. Listen to the stars/ Then give thanks to God!