On Stars and People

Crouching between twin soybean rows, I glanced behind me at the many parallel lines pointing to a hedgerow and expanse of farm land beyond. In front of me, the stripes filled the field’s acres, ending at last behind the home place’s backyard. I relished being so alone in all that space of low green plants, feeling that peculiar joy of solitude which exists, I think, in not really being alone at all. I imagined God surrounding me like the infant soybeans in their orderly ranks. "You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it."*

I lay back and looked up into the wide twilit sky, squirming for a comfortable position against hunks of last year’s stubble which dug into me like lumps in a mattress. Two stars (or more likely planets) glowed in hazy blue-gray heights. As I watched, two more seemed to appear, fuzzy and very small. By craning my head back, I could see another patch of sky and find more stars to add to my flock’s number—now five, now eight, at last eleven. I felt rather fond and proprietorial toward the little things.

My idyllic vigil terminated when a mosquito pestered my right ear, driving me to sit up and view the dusky expanse which divided me from the yellow glow of home. I hurried back, spurred by alarming recollections of coyote choruses in the blackness behind the house.

The stars weren’t the only ones I took on. At times during my visit to the home-place, I harbored a low-grade anxiety about my loved-ones there. I tromped about, trying to manage our relationship, trying to give this one what I thought was needed and that one what seemed best, and finding with alarm that once in a while needs seemed to contradict each other!

It turns out that I am not all that. And it seems rather funny that I thought I could be responsible for so much--could claim wild, appalling, fiery heavenly bodies, numbering them and patronizing them because they seemed small and dim through the indistinction surrounding me.

Only One can lead forth the stars. Only One knows the name of each. And only One knows my loved ones thoroughly, from the number of hairs on their head to the number of days in their lives. It is He who made my life distinct from the inert earth beneath my feet in the field that night. And He is the one who has laid His hand upon me, and upon those I love.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.

*Psalm 139:5-6 ESV