As I was prayerfully thinking about what to blog today, I read back on some older post. I decided to repost this one from Thanksgiving 2007. Our God is an awesome and we have so much to be thankful for.

This is a photo of a nebula or star explosion called the "Eye of God."

During our family church retreat we focused on the awesomeness of the universe and our role in it. The speakers shared recent research that gives a conservative estimate of 10, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, or 10 thousand, billion, billion, properly known as 10 sextillion. An estimated 50 billion galaxies are visible with modern telescopes. It’s believed that there are 100, 000,000,000 galaxies in the universe or 100 trillion galaxies. There are hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy making the total number of stars in the universe roughly 100 billion X 100 billion. 

The amazing thing is that God calls each star by name.

(Psalm 147:4) He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. 

The passage in Philippians about shining like stars was one that our family worked hard to live by, especially when the kids were young. We taught the boys not to grumble about such things as homework, lunch menus, and no recess, so that they would shine at school. It paid off when they had opportunities to share their faith. Teachers often told me that they trusted my my boys more than other students because of their lack of grumbling. In the vastness of their schools they shined like stars. 

Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life--in order that I may boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor for nothing (Philippians 2:14-16).

As God has drawn me closer to him and spoken to me in ways like never before, I feel the awesomeness of how his Holy Spirit works. When I think of myself among the stars, I feel like a small dot in the universe. But then to think that God also knows me by name and his eye is always on me, causes me to fall down before him in thanksgiving.