Katie Alsup, who conveniently and ironically was Elsa for Halloween, has been encouraging me this week to “Let It Go.” I have been holding tight to my plans and praying that God will give me what I want, neglecting to consider His plan. Conversation this week has included lots of tightly held fists to demonstrate my attempt to engineer my path. Thank you Elsa Katie for your wisdom and for not being embarrassed to *balls fists* talk to me in public. I am a demonstrative speaker.
Every week for my Geology class we have to find an article that relates to the geology of a National Park. This week I found this article about our growing inability to see the stars.
“We watched it get dark, and in the nighttime horizon, the sky was perforated by stars and streaked by the Milky Way. Or, to put it in approximate scientific terms, it was probably a 3 on the Bortle scale, the nine-level numeric metric of night-sky brightness.
Even so, we could still see domes of hazy light from 200-odd miles south in Los Angeles and 250 miles east in Las Vegas. That encroaching urban glow was like highlighter calling attention to the issue that Nordgren, a prophet whose cause is light pollution, wanted to illustrate for me.
“We’re losing the stars,” the 45-year-old astronomer told me.”
The whole article is great, but I thought the opening quote was really gneiss. [I’m sorry I had to.]
“If you see a car along that road,” Tyler Nordgren warned me, “don’t look at the headlights. It’ll ruin your night vision for two hours.”
-Todd Pitock, “Losing Sight of the Stars” [1]
I’ve been staring into the blinding headlights of my plans, holding tight to my earthly, tangible, comfortable, man-made-headlight life and obscuring what I should be camping out to stargaze at: The Plan. The stars He’s made are better than any earthly daylight equivalent I am finding, and I want my eyes to be able to see it. Letting go of the things that are pulling me from His Will gives me a better picture of what His plan is. He is better.
“Cause if you never leave home, never let go
You’ll never make it to the great unknown till you
Keep your eyes open, my love”NEEDTOBREATHE
The first star that I saw last night was a headlight
Of a man-made sky, but man- made never made our dreams collideSWITCHFOOT
xx
[1] Pitock, Todd. “Losing Sight of the Stars.” Losing Sight of the Stars. The Week, 27 Sept. 2015. Web. 03 Nov. 2015.
