Tiny Grains
AM Psalm 55 • PM Psalm 138, 139:1-17(18-23)
Neh. 4:1-23 • Rev. 7:(4-8)9-17 • Matt. 13:31-35
These days when I get up before the Sun and take my dog for a walk, I get to see the Orion constellation smack dab in the middle of the southern sky. Orion has one of the brightest stars up there and its name is Betelgeuse. Yet as I stand on Terra Firma in front of my house, this prominent star looks so small. I’ve been taught, of course, that this little grain of light in the sky is really very, very big. Turns out that astronomers classify “the armpit of Orion” as a Red Supergiant. Betelgeuse is 950 times larger than the Sun.
How big is that?
Well, if our Sun were only a tiny grain of sand, just a tenth of a millimeter, then Betelgeuse would be the size of a yoga ball; one of the big ones, about a meter in diameter. (I think of Kelly in accounting who sits on one—it’s big and blue and looks so odd, but it’s supposed to be so good for your back.)
So with a grain of sand and a yoga ball in my mind’s eye, I can kind of imagine something up in the heavens and “see” just how big it really is.
Which is very much how I feel when I think about what Jesus has to say about a mustard seed planted in a field.
When Jesus was talking about reality—not what we think life is like but what life is really like, he compared it to a mustard seed. He said that God’s Reality is like a tiny grain that someone took and sowed in their field. A mustard seed is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it’s a big leafy shrub and it becomes a tree; a mustard tree so big that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches. The mustard seed shakes things up! It changes the landscape and brings in the birds.
So today I’m okay with looking up into heaven and feeling very, very small. I mean if Betelgeuse is a yoga ball and the Sun is a grain of sand, then Earth is microscopic and I’m standing in my driveway with my dog at some subatomic level of existence thinking:
“I may be just a grain on a grain that’s floating around a grain, but that mustard grain? It changed the field. And a field is way bigger than a yoga ball.”
Written by Troy Schremmer
Troy works with preschool age children as an enrichment teacher in music and movement and has started volunteering to help in Children’s Sunday School. Special thanks to his wife and editor, Jonny, his son and science consultant, Huck, and his dog and early morning walking companion, Sunny, for their patience and assistance in getting this reflection written.