A Meditation on Psalm 19:1

“The heavens keep telling the wonders of God, and the skies declare what he has done.” (Psalm 19:1 CEV)

The recent return of Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore to Earth has driven many eyes to the skies. These two astronauts spent nine months “stranded in space,” according to one headline. A SpaceX capsule provided safe passage back home.

The event beckons me to reconsider David’s words in Psalm 19:1: “The heavens keep telling the wonders of God, and the skies declare what he has done.”

Unlike Williams and Wilmore, I haven’t spent any time “in the heavens.” I’m honestly not one—not right now, at least—to catch myself spending time looking toward the heavens either. Instead, my evenings tend to be filled with making dinner, eating dinner, washing dishes after dinner, giving baths, taking a bath, and praying to the dear Lord that our little one will give in to sleep and stay asleep all night.

After all that, I don’t even think about walking outside to observe God’s handiwork in the skies.

But I bet Williams and Wilmore do. I bet after their time orbiting the Earth, they see Earth differently. I bet they see evenings differently too. I bet they make time, at least once, to step outside and look in that evening sky, feeling fondness for the stars that were once their friends. The moon that was once their neighbor next door.

I imagine being in the heavens reshapes your perspective entirely.

Creation has a way of doing this, of reshaping our view of life so that—suddenly, with new clarity—we rethink what it means to be human: so small, so frail, yet ingenious enough to craft a machine that can orbit in space. Or we rethink how we see home: Earth is monstrous from one angle, yet delicate to the point where even a small change in its 23.5-degree tilt would be catastrophic. We’d have extreme temperature changes that humanity would not survive.

The heavens tell us of the wonders of God. Each little detail—gravity, axes, orbits—show how much more God is capable of than me. I can’t craft a rocket for space. And even literal rocket scientists can’t explain everything the heavens have to offer.

But God can.

The skies declare what He has done. I can’t help but read this line and think, The skies also declare what we have done. For all the ingenious of humanity, we have also caused much damage. And sometimes, we feel hopeless to undo it; we certainly cannot reverse time or miraculously heal the wounds of our world.

But God can.

Maybe you and I will never have the opportunity to be “in the heavens,” but this psalm invites us to have a reshaped perspective anyway. Simply making time one evening to look to the heavens and realize Someone made all this can reshape how we view the problems we’re dealing with at home. We’re small, but He’s faithful. We’re weak, but He’s capable.

And with His help, I believe we can enact a miracle, and healing is exactly the kind of work He has done and continues to do. 💛