The Girth of God

"Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span..."
Isaiah 40:12

If I were not in church, I would never read those words from Isaiah probably, or if I did, it would be a quick scan, not something I would contemplate much, certainly not a brief phrase that I would imagine using for a spiritual talk. Good thing I'm in a church. Good thing I have a pastor whose eyes don't speed read through the Old Testament.

Lee, bless him, always paints a picture for we visual-minded folks with our TV brains. Lake Michigan is 300 miles across at its widest, and about 1,000 feet deep at its deepest. (That's over 3 football fields, which is the only way I can visualize distance, which is odd because I'm not a big football fan.) Anyway, it's a lot of water, and if you throw in lakes Huron, Ontario, Erie and Superior it's a lot to put in a measuring cup, which Lee held up for another visual aid, bless him. And then we add all the other inland lakes and the rivers, seas and oceans and imagine that in the hollow of God's hand. Suddenly God gets quite gargantuan.

As a side benefit, I immediately have this really fond feeling for God, this Spirit who uses a human anatomy word picture to try and describe himself in human terms so we can get just a tiny inkling of his ubiquitousness.

And then Lee talked about the heavens, and asked for statistics. I'm so glad I belong to a church where questions are asked and answers are called out from the Body, a church where we don't sit passively and run the risk of having our minds wander to what's on sale at Wal-Mart or how long it will take for the pot roast to cook in the crock pot. I'm also impressed by the statistical knowledge of many of these lovely people, who know so much more than I do about the speed of light and the nearest constellations and how long it would take to travel there. If Lee could have broken space travel down into football field measurements, I might have been able to wrap my brain around it a bit better.

Then he talked the heavens and being a guide in the mountains of Colorado, and making a base camp at 10,000 feet. After all the young men helped set up camp at dusk in record time, they took each boy outside of camp about 100 yards, which, when I think of a football field, is pretty far when you're high up in the mountains with night crawling in. The guides also took their sleeping bags and went out 100 yards individually, so that everyone was arranged in a spoke around the base camp. So there they were, a connected circle, but separate in their own Rocky Mountain world. I can almost hear the silence. And I could almost see the stars when Lee described lying there and looking up at a heaven so vast and so deep that it felt as if you could reach up your hand and touch it, and that it could swallow you in its immensity and dimension.

Then I thought of God measuring the vastness of space stretched out between his thumb and pinky finger. When I think of a God that big, I see a glimpse of why the sight of a dandelion poking through a crack in the sidewalk can bring me to tears. I begin to understand how I can stand in line at the bank and see these invisible threads between each and everyone of us there, and be filled with such love for strangers. God's girth is so enormous that he touches every thing, and every one. And occasionally when I am very lucky I feel the universe wrapped in his arms and saturated in Love.