University of Maine geology professor, Kevin McCartney, has erected what is possibly the world’s largest scale model of our solar system.  Built on a scale of 93 million to 1, the model stretches along 40 miles of U. S. Rout 1, from Presque Isle to Houlton.  The sun is three stories high.  The earth, located about a mile from Percy’s Auto Sales in Presque Isle is the size of a grape fruit.  Some have complained that the earth should be larger – beach ball-sized perhaps.  But a beach ball-sized earth would require 240 miles of U. S. Route 1, and a sun with a football field long diameter.

I would really love to walk the 40m miles of Professor McCartney’s scale model, if for no other reason than to get the perspective of scale. Except for Jupiter and Saturn, the planets are impossible to find without the brochure. How better to get a sense of the vast space of Space? I know that the distances of an atom – from the nucleus to the electron shell, and the disparity in size between a proton and an electron are just as severe – and just as astonishing to imagine.

Moments of such astonishment, like the feeling one gets when seeing Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, or Mount McKinley for the first time are important because they jolt us with the realization of scale.  They remind us of our smallness, and of God’s bigness.

To grasp all the distances – between the Earth and the Moon, the Earth and the Sun, the sun and Alpha Centauri, the Sun and the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy and the Center of our Universe – and then to think of God’s omnipresence certainly helps one to “humble” oneself “before the mighty hand of God,” (I Peter 5.6).

The bigness of God, his omnipresence communicates, almost counter-intuitively, his intimacy. If God is everywhere, then he is to be found not only in the distances between galaxies, but in the distance inside an atom.  David certainly understood God’s bigness, his omnipresence as evidence of his intimacy.  He wrote in Psalm 139: “Where can I go from your presence?...Even before I formulate a word, you know what it is…such knowledge is too wonderful for me.”

Yes, such knowledge is too wonderful, and thrilling, and comforting.

We are, as David says in the same psalm, “fearfully and wonderfully made” – we, and our atoms, our solar system,  - the whole cosmos.

What a gift it is to have the perspective of scale.