The Telescope Aimed at Nothing

In 1995, astronomer Robert Williams made a decision his colleagues called a waste of time. He pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a tiny patch of sky near the Big Dipper — a sliver no larger than a grain of sand held at arm's length — where, as far as anyone could tell, absolutely nothing existed. Just blackness. He kept the shutter open for ten consecutive days, collecting ancient light photon by photon.

When the image finally resolved, the astronomy world went silent. That "empty" patch of sky contained over three thousand galaxies. Not stars — entire galaxies, each holding hundreds of billions of stars, stretching back nearly to the beginning of time itself. What looked like nothing turned out to be everything, hidden in plain sight, waiting to be revealed.

This is the extravagance Paul is trying to describe in Ephesians 3:20. When we bring our prayers to God, we are like astronomers squinting at a dark sky with the naked eye, seeing nothing and assuming nothing is there. We ask for a star or two. Maybe a small constellation, if we are feeling bold. But God operates on a scale that makes our most ambitious prayers look like that tiny grain-of-sand window into the cosmos. He is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.

The power at work within us is not small. We simply have not opened the shutter long enough to see what He has already placed in the darkness, waiting to shine.