The Static That Turned Out to Be the Echo of Creation

In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, had a modest problem. Their radio antenna picked up a persistent hiss — a low, steady noise they couldn't eliminate. They checked every component. They even scraped pigeon droppings from the horn-shaped receiver, suspecting the birds were the culprits.

They asked for silence. What they got was the voice of the universe.

That stubborn hiss turned out to be cosmic microwave background radiation — the faint afterglow of the Big Bang itself, still reverberating across 13.8 billion years of space. Penzias and Wilson weren't searching for the origin of the cosmos. They just wanted a clean signal. Instead, they stumbled into one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science, and it earned them the Nobel Prize.

Paul writes in Ephesians 3:20 that God "is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us." We come to God with small, practical requests — fix this, help me with that, quiet the static in my life. And God, in His immeasurable generosity, doesn't just answer our prayers. He opens doors we didn't know existed, reveals purposes we couldn't have dreamed, and works on a scale that dwarfs our boldest imagination.

You may be asking God to remove the noise. He may be about to show you the origins of everything.