WONDERFULLY MADE

It’s amazing to consider the vast diversity of life. From the tiniest of microbes to ultra-massive black holes, from single-celled organisms to complex body structures like plants and animals, or even earth’s biomes or interstellar gas planets. The variety is enough to blow the mind.

Let’s consider the mere scale of creation for just a moment. They say over one million earths could fit into the sun. And yet, the sun is just a speck amid the vastness of the Milky Way. But at 100,000 light years across, our galaxy is merely average in size. Andromeda, the galaxy next door, is twice that size and astronomers estimate another galaxy way beyond the north 40 that’s possibly 2 million light years across.

When pondering such unfathomable dimensions it’s not hard to sigh alongside the author of Psalm 8:

When I consider your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which you have set in place,

what is mankind that you are mindful of them,

human beings that you care for them?

If the sun is barely a speck in space, what are we? Pretty insignificant in the scope of the universe. And yet, the Psalmist proclaims with stunned wonder,

You have made them a little lower than the angels

and crowned them with glory and honor.

We may be specks of dust, even on a global scale, but we are dust that is retained by the very breath of God. We are so significant in our Creator’s eyes that He saturates us in the glory of all His hands have made. Even in life here on “the other side of Montana,” where nature’s beauty may require more effort to discern to the untrained eye, we can still soak in the experience of God’s provision.

He calms the spirit through a splash of silver that laces the river in the evenings. He contents the heart with the sight of wheat casting reflections of sunshine over the rolling horizon. We’re offered the perfume of pungent sage along the scant traces of prairie. He satisfies with traces of Eden’s bounty - from June berries to wild asparagus, from crabapples to prairie turnips – and that’s just a sampling from the menu that God provides along the Hi-line.

Here on “the other side of Montana” old homesteads appear to grow organically into the landscape while God’s palette of wonder frequently surprises us when it spills across the dawn and lays a striking stain at sunset. But it’s at night when utter blackness plunges into the depths of space and the stars come out in their brilliant parade across the dome does Montana really live up to its reputation as Big Sky Country.

Yes, God was mindful of us when He made the Hi-line of Montana, and there’s nothing insignificant about living in a place we can call God’s country.

Theresa Danley, CLP

Milk River Churches