Jan Nichols, chairman of high school science department, launched two projects to show 1) how small some things are, and 2) how large some things are in space. Once Nichols launched the projects he began to realize that when teachers talked about light years and millions of miles, students didn’t have the foggiest idea of what teachers were talking about.
As part of the project, Nichols arranged for students to count to a million. Nine hundred students participated and it took them 18,000 minutes or 300 hours, which translates to 12-and-a-half 24-hour days, just to count to a million. When they got down to the last 10,000, they began picking up kernels of popcorn and putting them in large bottles. It took 75 bottles–the size used in water coolers–just to hold the popcorn. Tara Schafer, a 13-year-old who participated in the project, said, "If we hadn’t counted it ourselves I wouldn’t believe it was only one million. I would probably think it was about ten million because I could never imagine exactly how much that really was."
Numbers are almost meaningless unless there is something against which we can measure them, something to indicate scale. For example, a diorama–a miniature landscape–can be photographed looking as large as life itself. Actually, that’s what movie directors often do to give the effect of a ship being blown on a stormy sea. Actually the ship is a miniature and the ocean is an overgrown bath tub with fans churning the water.
When it comes to space, however, there is little by which we can measure it. That’s why in 1888 scientists began to use the expression "lightyears" to express distance between stars and heavenly bodies. A lightyear is "a unit of length in interstellar astronomy equal to the distance that light travels in one year in a vacuum, or about 5.878 trillion miles." That’s an extremely long distance to traverse, even if you have a bicycle.
Our closest star is Alpha Centauri. It is five times the size of our sun, and it takes light from Alpha Centauri 4.5 years to reach us. Compare this with 1.5 seconds for light to reach us from the moon.
We may fail to remember that God is not bound by space nor time. A grafitto on a wall read, "GOD IS NOWHERE." But a little girl who saw it read it correctly. She said, "Look Mom! The sign says, ‘God is now here!’ " God is as close as your faintest heart cry. As Isaiah wrote, "The Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither His ear heavy, that it cannot hear" (Isaiah 59:1, KJV).
With God, whether they represent people or the distance to objects in space–numbers never represent separation or challenge. God is beyond that–for which we can be very thankful. Resource Reading: Isaiah 59:1-21