Monday, May 14, 2007

There are lakes on Titan

chugh jIH tlhap the telDu' vo' the dawn, je settle Daq the uttermost parts vo' the bIQ'a

If I take the wings of the dawn, And settle in the uttermost parts of the sea... Psalm 139:9

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There are lakes on Titan, one of the moons orbiting Saturn. Something like 859 million miles away (more than a billion, 382 million kilometers), those seas (of methane, but seas just the same) are farther than the farthest ocean on earth. AND.

God. IS. there.

No doubt there are more distant seas.

We know of dozens of worlds circling distant stars already - mostly huge Jupiter-sized worlds, and there are certainly many more. As we refine our technologies we get better and better at discovering what seems like an endless supply of planets that God has made. There are shores out there as well. The farthest oceans are many tens, thousands, MILLIONS of light years out there. And should we travel "on the wings of the dawn" to those shores - we will find the same.

God. IS. there.

The Hebrew word used here for sea, yam, occurs more than 300 times in the Bible, and comes from a root meaning "to roar" (think of the sound of the surf). On some distant planet, if you needed to translate that word in conversation with a Klingon fellow traveler, you might use bIQ'a.' That Klingon word is a construction, taking the word for water (bIQ) and augmenting it with -'a'. Essentially it means "very big water" and it's a word that a Klingon might use mean lake, sea or ocean.

And whether we cross real oceans, or methane ones far away, there are always new shores in our lives, new frontiers as we journey through each day.

There is a prayer "O, God Thy Sea Is So Great And My Boat Is So Small." The good news is that on the waters of life - no matter where - in that boat, we will NOT be alone.

The comfort we find in the reflections of Psalm 139 is that, we can't go so far - Titan, Alpha Centauri or beyond - so far that we can ever get away from HIM.

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