How Big is the Universe

I was leaving the Advance Auto Parts store the other day and this man exited behind me with his son. I noted the he had a tee-shirt on with the words, "Mad Scientist" inscribed across it. I asked him if the shirt gave an accurate description of its owner. He looked down at his shirt, smiled and said, "Yes! I am a kind of crazy scientist." He told me that he was a biochemist working for J&J in large molecule research. I asked if his son also shared the "mad" trait.

"Oh, for sure!" he said and then turned to his son and told him to tell me what he did.

"I sell solar panels for residential households in Nevada and Rhode Island," he said.

I asked him if it was true that solar panels will pay for themselves in several years of use. He told me that indeed they would. But then I asked if they would do this if they were not getting help from government subsidies. He admitted that they needed subsidies to make them pay off. He immediately saw my point. These things were only profitable because the rest of us were paying taxes to make them so; they were not cost effective on their own merits.

As this point sank in, I pointed to the trees lining the parking lot and told him that I really love the "solar collectors" that God has put up in the trees. It quickly dawned on him that I was talking about the leaves, now turning a bright yellow in the Autumn sunlight. He said that there was research taking place that would make it possible to harness sunlight and use it to fixate carbon molecules, just like the chlorophyll was able to do. He and his dad both agreed that the best that they could do as mad scientists was to copy those things already being done by nature. It was obvious that the three of us standing there in the parking lot were all being inspired by the same wonder of God's creation.

So, I went one step bigger and said how it is amazing to realize that the universe as big as it is because God knew when he was making it that someday we were going to need cellphones. And in order to have all the requisite molecular compounds for such devices, there was going to have to be a universe large enough to accommodate three generations of exploding, supernova stars in order to fuse all of these compounds together in solar furnaces. A big smile broke across his face! "Yes! Isn't that such an amazing wonder!" he said. Obviously, this young man had already been aware of the fact that first generation stars create elements up to oxygen, second generation up to iron and third generation create all the rest.

God truly knew that we were coming and provided so lavishly in advance for us. We truly serve a wonderful God. And all that could be seen standing there in the Advance Auto Parts parking lot by merely lifting our eyes to the heavens!