God Showed Me The Moon
I started watching the stars in December of last year.
One of my friends regularly came over and brought my attention to what the moon was doing most days. Some days it was a crescent, or just beginning to appear as the sun bowed out, and on others, it shone so brightly no one could ignore it. One day it hung so low over our heads, I swore I could touch it if I jumped high enough.
During one of our walks, he pointed to the sky — ‘See that star right beside the moon? That’s Jupiter. And if you turn back and draw a broken straight line, that’s Venus.’ They were bright, beaming, as if to say ‘Look at me. I’m not like the other stars in the sky. I’m a planet. There is life on me.’ This is where it got fascinating. We would note the position or shape the moon took every night, and see where Jupiter and Venus were relative to it.
Sometimes the moon shifted out of alignment with Jupiter, and I wondered if ut would affect how my day went. On other days, Jupiter was brighter than ever, and I looked up if this would cause some eventful worldwide Illuminati shakeup in the next decade. If the movement of the stars mattered, how did it affect me? Did the hue of the moon mean I would find a lover?
Astronomy was real to me now, and I began to wonder how big the world beyond us was. I would come out every night, and stare at the moon, at Jupiter, Venus, Orion’s Belt, and the world beyond. It was beautiful. I was going to get a telescope and watch it, look back in time to see the stars glow, see Jupiter in all its humongous, dust-clouded glory, and compare my woman’s beauty to Venus. (She won).
Curiosity naturally got the better of me, and I got my hands on Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s ‘Astrophysics for Young People In a Hurry’. He told me of the planets, the stars, the Big Bang, black holes, the traveling of time through space, how matter interacted, and the real width of the universe.
He told me about dark matter and built a picture of the ever-expanding universe in my mind’s eye, where the Milky Way was just a cluster of a bunch of stars, and there were many more Milky ways around me, bigger Milky Ways, smaller Milky Ways, forces that controlled them, the perfectly-shaped stars named pulsars, the life span of stars and the dramatic way they die, the possibility of life we may be unable to fathom on Mars, Jupiter, and exoplanets.
…. and all of a sudden it was so breathtaking, so overwhelming.
I felt so small and inconsequential.
Minute compared to the depth of the host of matter and life the universe contains. A speck of dust in all the action that sparked billions of years before I was born.
I felt useless. I observed and saw homo sapiens as no better than animals. Animals with a higher intelligence. We were driven by the same things animals are. The need for sex as a reproductive prerequisite, lizard brains humping each other to keep the human race alive, the resulting pleasure a dangled carrot. One language, all men, just in different dialects and tongues. Freewill was a farce, we lived behind in time already, the light reaching us after the magic in the universe had happened. Multi-decade events coinciding with movement the moon made months ago. The rest of the universe light-years away from us, not years.
Just another animal. Just a higher population and intelligence.
How many different species were out there, made to think they were God’s special ones? Who else was given the sword tap on the shoulder to reproduce, conquer, and explore?
God has to be real. This is all too perfectly planned and aligned to be a cause of chance or mere coincidence. Either God is real, or the matrix is real, and we live in a simulation. Gravity can’t put 9 planets in rotation, a bunch of stars in a cluster, living organisms with agency on a planet where there somehow is everything they need to live 2000 years after the dinosaurs. Something, someone has to have orchestrated this somehow.
I don’t think you understand.
IT HAS TO BE ORCHESTRATED. If it is not, what is your purpose? To grow up and live your entire life around how to make more of the accepted medium of exchange so you can live in a bigger house than the rest of the species? When did we begin to accept a medium of exchange, you think? At some point land was land, fruit was fruit, no price tag. Yesterday I paid 500 naira for a single apple.
The only guarantee you have is that it is all orchestrated. If it is all carefully planned and choreographed, you have no free will, but you have purpose. You have a reason to be here if it is: you have something to do, and then die only after doing it.
But.. when you think about it — it’s beautiful, isn’t it?
You, a barely visible speck of dust in a universe billions of years old. There are more planets than scientists can count, with the possibility of life on a good number of them. Your sun torments you every day — if you live closer to the Equator like myself — and yet it is a little brother compared to the other stars. There is more light than your little eyes can see, more movement occuring in what you consider invisible. Thousands of planets not orbiting our Sun, with the closest one being more than a trillion meters away.
And somehow, you’re special to God. You’re protected every step of the way. Your life matters to Him. He takes the time to speak to you, like only you exist in this cosmos.
You’re born with a special set of skills, and talents, and in 8+ billion others there is no one exact copycat of you. He took his time to mold and put you where you are for a reason. To achieve gigantic things.
He comforts you. He takes time out of his beautiful design to be with you, always. Omnipresent. Everything about him is everywhere all at once. He could be in a million places, but he is always with you.
Emmanuel.
In the grand scheme of things, you might seem unimportant to the rest of the universe, but not to Him. And you can doubt, but -
God has to be real. He showed me the moon last December.
