BackstageThere is a line in the Psalms that I did not believe for years, even as I sang it.
He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name (Psalm 147:4). I would read that and quietly file it under poetry, a lovely exaggeration, the kind of thing worship writers say. Then one night I drove an hour out past the streetlamps, parked at the edge of an empty field, lay back on the cold hood of the car, and looked up. And the sky was not a sky I had ever known. Every deeper look humanity takes into the dark, the great telescopes reaching past what any eye can see, finds more. Another field of galaxies pouring out of the black, and past those, more, and no floor to it that anyone has found. I lay there in the cold trying to hold the size of it, and I could not fit it inside my chest.
And I did the thing the shepherd-king David did under a different sky three thousand years before me. I asked the question that this whole album is built on: When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have set in place, what is man, that You are mindful of him? (Psalm 8:3-4).
The vastness was the thing I was afraid of
I have to be honest about where I started, because it is where a lot of people are stuck.
For most of my life the size of God frightened me. I assumed that a God vast enough to fling a hundred billion galaxies would have to be, by definition, uninterested in me. Too big to bend down. Too occupied with the machinery of the cosmos to notice a small woman sweeping a small kitchen at three in the afternoon. The numbers did not comfort me; they erased me. If He is that enormous, I reasoned, then I am a footnote nobody bothers to cite.
That is exactly the fear the album walks straight into. There is a song called "Smaller Than a Speck and Loved," and it names the terror before it names the mercy: I have read the numbers and they did not fit inside my chest. I should be a footnote nobody bothers to cite. Because the Milky Way is a speck in the cosmos, and the solar system a speck in the Milky Way, and the planet a speck in that, and us a speck on the planet. By every honest measure, I should be paralyzed by my own smallness.
And then the whole record turns, because the same Scriptures that tell you how vast He is tell you what He does with the vastness.
He bent down
Here is the wonder that undid the fear, and it is the exact center of the album.
The very same voice that Job heard from the whirlwind, Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loose the cords of Orion? (Job 38:31), the voice that hung the Hunter in the winter sky and set the seven sisters wheeling, that voice learned a human name. In the song "You Know the Name of Every Star," I sing the thing I finally came to believe out on that car hood: the One who names the trillion stars above has named me too, and the name is love. There is no anonymous galaxy in His library of light. And there is no daughter on a back porch with her coffee growing cold whose name He has not carved beside a star upon the line.
This is not me being sentimental about astronomy. It is the plainest claim of the gospel, and the album says it as bluntly as it can in "The God of Galaxies." The hands that scooped the seas held a tiny finger. The voice that sang the spheres into their orbits cried in the night. The God of galaxies was a baby in a barn beneath the Bethlehem starlight. The letter to the Colossians says of Yeshua that by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, and that in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:16-17). And that same One emptied Himself, took the form of a servant, and bent all the way down (Philippians 2:6-7). The vastness did not stay remote. It stooped.
The heavens are not silent
The reason I could only make this album is that the sky, to my ear, has never been quiet.
There is a Psalm that has followed me my whole life: The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard (Psalm 19:1-4). Read that slowly. The sky is speaking. Not in words, the Psalm is careful to say there is no actual language, no syllable, and yet its voice goes out to the ends of the earth. The whole cosmos is a sermon preached without a single word, and every human being who has ever looked up has been in the congregation.
That wrecks me, as someone who listens for a living. The stars are not decoration. They are proclamation. In the song "The Heavens Declare" I sing it the only way I can, every sunrise is a salutation, every sunset is a benediction, every star is a small confession of allegiance. The cosmos has been preaching the same conviction since the first morning, and the wonder is not that it is loud. The wonder is that it is constant, and free, and pointed the whole time at the tenderness of the One who made it.
You are big enough to be uninterested. You are great enough to overlook. But He bent down. Oh, He bent down. He bent down to the speck and wrote her in His book.
The vastness is the safe place
Everything on the album empties into its final song, and I want to give you its whole reversal, because it is the thing I most want you to carry.
The song is called "Vastness," and it begins with the old fear stated one more time: I used to be afraid of the vastness of God. I used to think the size of Him would crush the size of me. And then it turns, and does not turn back: But the vastness of God is the safest place I have ever known. The vastness of God is the wideness of a Father's arms. The vastness of God is the room for every wound to be welcomed. A small God, a God the size of my understanding, would run out of room. He would have a limit I could reach, a mercy I could exhaust, a patience I could wear through. But a God as wide as the cosmos has space in Him for everything I am and everything I have done and everything I have not yet dared to bring.
The apostle Paul stakes his whole life on it: I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39). Height nor depth. He reaches for the biggest words he has, the scale of the universe itself, and says not even that is large enough to get between you and the love that holds you.
For the one who feels too small to be seen
I made this for the person lying awake feeling like a footnote.
The one who has done the math on their own insignificance, the vast sky, the vast history, the billions of other faces, and concluded that of course God has not got time for a soul as small as theirs. I want to tell you what the field of stars told me on the hood of that car. The size of Him is not your erasure. It is your welcome. He counted the tears that fell in the dark and saved them in a vase the same night He set the Pleiades wheeling. He is not too holy to bend, not too high to stoop, not too good to enter the kitchen of the lost.
So go outside tonight, if you can, and look up until the size of it starts to frighten you a little. And then remember: the One who knows the name of every star out there leaned all the way down through all of it to learn yours, and He has been whispering it, over your small and beloved life, since before the oldest light up there began its journey to your eyes.
You were never a footnote. You were the reason He bent down.
