From A Near Distance

I stepped outside before dawn this morning to listen to the first birdsong of the day. Standing in the damp grass, I drew a deep lungful of sweet air and kept still, listening, listening.

Off in the northern sky, traveling south by southeast, was what I first took to be an airplane. But the light was over-bright, had no flashing lights, and was traveling at a very high and steady speed, like a lethargic comet. I watched the light until it was gone from my sight, and then I went back inside and fetched my phone to check my suspicion.

And there it was. An app on my phone confirmed that what I had seen was indeed the International Space Station 400 kilometers above my little home.

I went back outside and looked in the direction the ISS had last been heading, but there was only a pure, unbroken, and slowly brightening horizon.. I thought of the view the men aboard the ISS must have, and I thought of the long ago days of childhood when I was obsessed with outer space and space travel, reading everything I could find on the subject. I remembered my mother’s fascination with the night sky, which she passed on to me. Many a night we stood outside when I was no taller than her hip, staring up into the glory of the faraway lights, listening to see if Mother was right, that those stars sang.

And on the edge of this morning, I thought of the technology that God has revealed to mankind to allow us to build such wonders as the ISS and to see and study our beautiful planet from afar. I thought of how we have pierced the heavens while ignoring them at the same time, how we have fired our rockets up into what poet-pilots once called “the face of God” and how we have used the powers and marvels of the technology He has given us to broadcast pornography and coordinate mob violence and cheat on exams and wreck marriages and undermine friendships and do all manner of mischief and wickedness.

Had I not looked over in the direction where it was traveling, I would not have seen the ISS streak past. This knowledge reminded me that there are many unseen things around me all the time, but the things of which I am thinking are not technological marvels. They are creatures of life. From tiny gnats and invisible bacteria to angels of staggering power and messengers of solemn influence, these things might be unseen, but they are not unimportant. And when I forget or even doubt that they are there, I am diminished in a way.

All this motion, all this movement, all these things and beings and occurrences and circumstances, and most of them above or below my notice. The word wonder is appropriate. I am growing older, but my capacity for wonder seems to be the one thing strengthening within me. May it never diminish.

Before I went back inside to dress for the day, the birds  began singing. I could not see them, but there they were, in the trees, and their song was all around me, and it was real.

~ S.K. Orr