Image credit Pixabay - Exoplanet
Can I Escape the Love of God in the Remotest Parts of the Universe?
(Psalm 139 verses 7-10 embraces eco-systems of far-off spheres)
At the time of editing this speculative meditation (July 2022), around 5100 exoplanets have been discovered, mostly in our own galaxy. With the new capabilities of the James Webb space telescope and the collaboration of state-of-the-art ground based telescopes, this number will almost certainly rise rapidly. So this re-imagining of four verses of Psalm 139 takes up the emerging possibilities of where one might try to hide from God! Exoplanets are planets that move round any of the billions of stars in the sky other than our own sun.
Can I escape the love of God
in the remotest parts of the universe?
Where mercury falls like torrential rain;
where acidic storms carve out vast bloated caves;
where near-symmetry is not the normal configuration of living creatures;
where gravity, weak as it may be, holds matter so tightly that movement is more turgid than the backwater of a brackish stream;
where multiple suns fling planets around unstable orbits;
where winds approach the speed of meteorites breaking into earth’s atmosphere;
where elements fuse in bewildering compounds;
and everything, everything is alien.
Even there, God would stretch out his arm
to enfold me in his compassionate care,
together with unimaginable, indigenous creatures
of those places;
a brimming over of that deep, deep well
of love of the Creator for his entire universe.