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24,901 miles is the equatorial circumference of the earth (40,075 km). If there were no sea to stop daily walking it would take us nearly three and a half years to walk that distance at a steady 20 miles per day.

If there was a road to the sun that you could walk  it would take us 12,740 years to walk to the sun. The sun is so far away from us the light that travels to earth takes eight minutes to arrive on earth, so the sun we see in the sky is actually a picture of events that took place eight minutes in the past. Extrapolate those distances and the sky at night is a real exercise in time travel, would you believe that there is light reaching us now that started its journey towards us before the earth was even formed.

It is impossible given the limitations of our frail human minds to comprehend these distances. We can work them out, write them down but we can't begin to understand them, the effort to try and imagine such events and distances defies us.

The Universe is so large that we cannot comprehend it. It is also impossible to see it as it actually is at this moment in time given the limitations of the speed of light. We have no idea about the current state of the Universe. It might not even be there anymore!

In the last few chapters I have made much reference to the intimate and personal nature of the relationship we can have with God. Now I want to try and lead us to see something else about the reality of God. This book is after all called Learning to See.

If you aren't feeling very small now in this universe, then I have failed to engage you in the reality of its size. It not only makes us feel small but also our petty worries and arguments seem utterly inconsequential when considered against the vastness of the Universe in which we live.

God who is the creator of this Universe is bigger than the Universe. He is outside existence as we know it, untouched by time or space. He created time as we understand it but He isn't in time. Time is irrelevant in discussions about God. So is the concept of size. I only mentioned it to try and awake in us a sense of awe. To realise that God is utterly other, unknowable and incomprehensible to our minds. 

Put bluntly it is impossible to comprehend anything about God. We are clueless. There is nothing which allows us to make any comparison.

So what do we know?

We know that within each and every person who has or will live we have an idea of God. A desire for God placed there by Him. We even call him, Him, which is an attempt to reduce the divine to something we can relate to and understand. No matter what you try to understand of God it is impossible.

Yet within us we have a desire to worship the giver of all things, this has been built into us. Can we do anything for God, could He possibly require anything from us? Of course not.

He needs nothing from us He is complete within himself.

Yet He has chosen to make known to us in terms understandable to us that He loves us. He is the essence of love itself. Our ability to love is a gift given to us since we are made in his image. Strange though it may seem our souls cry out to God, cry out to be removed from our isolation and to be made complete in Him. As we read in the Bible, we love God because He loved us first.

All of this stretches our minds to breaking point. It is utterly incomprehensible to us.

When we begin to see properly and understand, as we are able, The Divine, we can do nothing but fall to the ground in fear and trembling.

Our lives are as frail as the grass in the fields, the leaf on the tree, yet this God has chosen to grant us a glimpse of His reality and the only proper response is to praise, adore and love the Giver of our very short and fragile lives. And to return an absolute submission of our lives to Him.

These few hundred words in this chapter are worthless ashes. Who are we to even try to understand anything about The Lord and Giver of Life?

Do not reduce God to someone we think we know. Try to understand we know nothing of Him except a vague instinctive need to Love.