Barney's Blog

* Our Awesome God- I've always been fascinated with astronomy. As a kid, I owned two different telescopes, which I guess officially makes me a "nerd". The size of the universe is truly mind-boggling; the numbers are so large, we can't even begin to embrace their meaning. So lets just focus on our "neighborhood": our own solar system. (You know, the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc.) Remember those pictures of the solar system you saw in school? I hate to break this to you, but they were very wrong. If we drew a diagram of the solar system to scale with earth the size of a pea, the planet Jupiter would be over 1000 feet away! Little Pluto (which is no longer even considered a planet) would be 1.5 miles from earth, and about the size of a bacterium. Our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be nearly 10,000 miles away! Proxima Centauri is 100,000,000 times farther from earth than the moon...and that's our nearest neighbor!

That's only taking our solar system into consideration. As we move further out, we have our galaxy The Milky Way, which contains 100 billion stars and beyond that another 100 billion galaxies in the known universe, each containing 100 billion stars! So how many stars is that? A whole bunch! Scientists tell us that the average distance between individual stars is 20 million, million miles. Wow! Know how they got there? Psalm 33:6 tells us, "By the word of the LORD were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth." God said, "Let there be stars in the heavens and there they are! So how great is our God? How difficult are your challenges to him? How much trouble does he have with our problems? I think we can relax, knowing that our troubles are in his hands! He's the maker of the stars...he can handle it!

* National Day of Prayer- Today is the National Day of Prayer. Please take a moment and thank God that we live in a nation that still gives us the freedom to openly praise God and pray to him.

* Beth Moore Bible study- A 12-week women's Bible study on the book of Daniel begins next Tuesday May 8 at 7 PM.

* Opportunity- Michael Vance, a young man who attends our church, will be part of a Christian ministry working with the Bay Area Urban Project during the summer. They will help impoverished children in Oakland in a variety of ways. This is similar to PUMP in Portland, where our youth group has served in the past. Please read his letter on the foyer table and consider helping.

Blessings,
Barney