“God’s Love is Meteoric,

His Loyalty Astronomic,

His Purpose Titanic,

His Verdicts Oceanic!”

(Psalm 36:5)

by Debbie Allen

 I plopped on the couch one Saturday night to watch a movie with my husband.  Recognizing right away what movie he’d chosen, I knew my chances for seeing a Hallmark movie were slim to nothing. The movie, Predator, loomed before me for about the eighth time.  Wrinkling my nose, Jim began to defend his movie choice by explaining that this was not Predator…it was Predators…and he’d only seen this movie a couple of times! I settled for a good book that night; while Jim devoured repeat images of a team of special force soldiers on a mission in a Guatemalan jungle, being hunted and devoured by an invisible, extraterrestrial warrior!

To his defense, my husband is not the only one who is drawn toward these Science Fiction sensations. Our entire culture seems obsessed with the idea of aliens more today than at any other time in history. We see them on TV commercials.  Our children watch them in cartoons on Saturday morning. (What happened to the Flintstones?) Today’s teens engage alien creatures every day inside the virtual realities of their x-box games. Even the off-the-chart box-office responses to movies like Predators, continues to egg Hollywood on in the making of other Sci-Fi indulgences like it.

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“Our entire culture seems obsessed with the idea of aliens more today than at any other time in history.”

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It’s one thing for Hollywood to capitalize on our culture’s appetites for aliens but, I’ve found that even some of the highly educated lean toward believing in alien existence.  Several years ago, a team of scientific researchers working under a government program known as Ufology, actually devised a chart called the Hynek Scale; a six-fold system of classification allowing our own earthly officials a way to rate the level of intensity of an alien encounter.  It seems that once things are written down in black and white in this world, we suddenly believe we have a reason to believe in them! Even Hollywood endorsed this idea a little further when they filmed the 1977 Sci-Fi movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This movie’s entire plot was built around the Hynek Scale.  The human mind is capable of justifying just about anything…and Hollywood is always going to be there to back it with incredible and even believable images designed to create a pathway in our mind and heart to justify belief.  I personally, am a believer…but not in aliens. I believe in God, who spoke the Universe into creation.  I have no desire to measure my belief system in this life by the Hynek Scale.

When I peer up into the night sky, I don’t see Unidentified Flying Objects…I see Unimaginable Findings Overhead! I see the beauty of God’s Light piercing the darkness of this world.  The sun…the moon…and countless stars; each silently telling of the Glories of the Creator. The Universe is filled with beautiful displays of His Craftsmanship. Every constellation, planet, and galaxy  yields itself as dramatic evidence of God’s Existence, Faithfulness, and His Greatness.  Standing beneath evening’s canopy of starlight, I can’t help but sense my own finiteness and I can’t deny the Invisible Presence I feel standing right next to me in these moments. My heart races when I think of it; not out of fear but, love. In spite of all my own human frailties, God chooses to call me His friend.  What an awesome thought! One minute I hear His Voice resounding in the thunder and lightning above me; and in the next, He stoops to whisper the secrets of His Promises into my spirit (Ps. 25:14).  What kind of Love is this that keeps something so small (me) from getting lost in all of His Largness?

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“When I peer up into the night sky, I don’t see Unidentified Flying Objects…I see Unimaginable Findings Overhead! I see the beauty of God’s Light piercing the darkness of this world.”

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Yes, there is something out there watching us.  Something much bigger than you and I can even imagine…but, not an alien.  It’s God.  God is the Invisible Presence Who is in pursuit of our souls.  However, He pursues us as the Lover of our souls; not as Hollywood’s invisible Predator, who hunts and devours our very lives.   On the Hynek Scale, our world might classify this Divine Encounter with a Living Presence from out of this world, as a Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind.   I, on the other hand, understand it differently.  My heart can only call this Divine Encounter…this Invisible Presence…and Friendship, being so freely offered to each of us, by what it’s meant to be in this life:

The“Closest Encounter of the Deepest Kind.”

Won’t you choose to step away from Sci-Fi, Hollywood and Hynek’s Scale long enough to look up into the night sky and see only the Largness of God’s Love for you and I?

“God’s Love is Meteoric,

His loyalty Astronomic,

His Purpose Titanic,

His Verdicts Oceanic.

Yet in His Largness

Nothing gets lost;

Not a man, not a mouse,

slips through the cracks.”

(Psalm 36:5-6”)

HEART TRAPPING

Have you ever noticed how obsessed or pre-occupied our world is with aliens, and extraterrestrial activity in general?

What do you see when you look up into a midnight sky, studded with stars to numerous to count?

Did you know God not only created all the stars in the Universe but, He named each of them as well?

PRAYER: Dearest Father in Heaven, thank you for including the smallness of me in the Largeness of Your Love.  My eyes can fall on nothing…that You have not created.  In fact, Your Word tells me, “Everything was created through You; nothing—not one thing!—came into being without You.” (John 1:3).  If there are other life forms in the Universe, You would’ve created them…but they were never meant to become the focal point of the life you’ve given to us. Your greatest desire for us is to learn to love You with all our heart, mind, and soul, for only then will we come to know Your Meteoric Love and Your  Unimaginable Findings Overhead!

In Jesus Name…Amen