STARS

It is very very early on Saturday morning, and I’d gone to bed late with the pleasant feeling of knowing I could sleep late, and my bed was warm and cozy. So why am I standing outside in the dark in my robe and slippers, shivering in the 28 degree weather, after only four hours of sleep? Because I want to look at stars.

The night is very clear, the moon a fat sliver, and the stars are out in abundance. I stare at them for some time. So far away, farther than I can even comprehend. They speak to me of a world far bigger than I am, and remind me of a Creator who placed them in the heavens eons ago, who spoke them and everything else that is into existence.

I imagine the man Abraham must have spent many nights looking at stars. I know the story of how God called him out of his tent one night. He told him to look at the stars and to try to count them, an impossible, frustrating task. Then he made a promise to Abraham that filled him with awe and wonder. “That’s what your descendants shall be like.”

Abraham could have scoffed at this ludicrous idea, an idea which seemed to mock the childless state of this old man and his wife. It was nonsensical—that is, it went beyond all that made sense, all that was logical, all that was reasonable and likely. It was ridiculous, but Abraham didn’t ridicule it. He believed it.

He believed it, and that made God very happy. It pleased him, and so God made a covenant with this man and with his descendants forever.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if God’s promises always came to pass the day he made them? They don’t today, and they didn’t for Abraham. It would be twenty five long years before the promised child arrived, to a very very old man and woman, long past the years of childbearing. Ridiculous. Impossible. Outrageous and outlandish, but it happened.

Abraham lived all those years in a tent in the desert. It was easy to see stars, almost every night. How many nights did he spend gazing into the sky, struggling with questions, struggling with doubt, but always coming away with the choice to keep believing God?

God went on to say that his descendants would be like the stars of the sky and the sand of the sea. Abraham knew all about sand. He walked in it every day. Windstorms blew it into his tent, into his face and mouth. He could kick it up, he could gather it together in his hands and throw it in the air. It was all around him, part of the natural world he was so much a part of.

But stars were different. Stars are faith. And a man can live an entire life without really looking at stars. Stars require an effort, the effort to stop what you’re doing, to go outdoors, and to look up. To contemplate, to reflect, to consider. And even while you’re looking at stars, there is the understanding that you can’t experience stars in the same way you do sand. You can’t feel them, touch them, you can only look from far away and yearn.

Faith belongs to another dimension. The Pharisee Nicodemus came secretly one night to question Jesus, knowing that he had come from God but not quite yet believing, because so much of what Jesus was teaching flew in the face of everything Nicodemus stood for. Jesus startled him with these words—”I tell you, Nicodemus, unless a man is born from above, and is willing to rethink everything he has ever learned, he can’t even SEE the Kingdom of God.”

And like Abraham, those who enter into a faith covenant with God through His son Jesus Christ will have to live their lives out continually stretching and growing and believing through impossible circumstances—to continue looking at stars when we’re surrounded by sand, getting out of bed in the middle of the night to go outside and stare at the sky and things far more difficult than that.

I’m on a faith journey. And the price is high. But the rewards are far higher. The Bible says that God IS, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. I just happen to believe that.