Impressed?

I want you to allow yourself to be impressed. Humor me for a moment. I want you to think on all the greatness of creation. Let yourself be overwhelmed. Think of the stars - not just the stars - but the galaxies. Millions upon billions of these masses of fire and gas and light just filling the sky with the glory of God. Stars that make our sun look like a golf ball at the base of Mt. Everest. Think of the majesty of mountains and crashing waves and vast canyons. Fill your mind with the color and variety on this earth. Variety in trees and flowers and weather and landscapes and rivers and clouds and even food. Some counts state that there are more than 500 types of bananas. Over 500 BANANAS. I don’t even like bananas, but that’s pretty impressive. And laughter. So many different types of laughs. So much variety that can be seen in people in general. Hair color and eyes and dreams and voices and sizes. Do you remember from first grade how no two snowflakes are the same? Have you really thought about that recently? When was the last time you tried to count the number of snow flakes contained in a snow ball? How about the number of snow flakes in your yard? How many snowflakes do you think have graced this planet through history? And yet, no two are the same? Really?
Keep going with me. Just flood your mind with all the beauty and wonder and detail and grandeur from God’s handiwork that you possibly can. There’s plenty. You won’t run out. Waterfalls and butterflies and lions and desserts and underground caves and crystals and colors and thunder storms and coral reefs. Glow in the dark worms. Oak trees and cheetahs. Friendships. Lavender and lilacs. The smell after rain. Sand between your toes. Climbing a 60 foot tree. Sun on your face. Diving into a freezing lake. Music. Dancing. Running.
You and I are put together entirely of atoms, held on this rock by this unseen force called gravity, whirling around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour. There is enough information contained in your DNA to fill libraries…or to make circles around the moon. And at the same time - it all fits inside your cells. You are beautifully and wonderfully made. Sounds cliché…but truly, you are. The way that your 206 bones fit together with your blood vessels and muscles and ligaments and skin. How about the way your skin just knows how to heal itself from a paper cut? No one has to tell the blood to clot or the new skin cells to form. But they do. Your body does so many incredible things every single moment without you giving it a thought. Breathing, moving, building, repairing, pulsing, living.
Impressed yet? No? Try thinking about the way a baby grows in the womb. 24 days after conception, you had a beating heart. After 8 weeks, you had taste buds. After 9 weeks, you could suck your thumb. 12 weeks, you practiced breathing. At some precise moment, the millions of nerve endings in your eye lined up with the millions of nerve endings from your brain and the last one connected and by 7 months…You. Had. Sight. Just like that. You could see.
And this crazy wonderful, detailed, magnificent world of ours is so insignificantly small in the vastness of the universe. It is all hung on nothing and spinning through the blackness faster than we can understand and still, somehow, it is all held together. It all keeps going and functioning and living and glorifying God, day after day, through space and time.

Once upon a time, in all the vastness of space and time, there was a man. Beautifully and wonderfully made, but he would have fit in right along with you and I. He walked and ate and slept. He was not beautiful that we should desire Him. He had acne as a teen. He stubbed his toe. He had late night cravings. He got the flu. He played sports with his friends. He went to school. He probably did not seem so extraordinary. Maybe he was average in everything. Perhaps he was short. Maybe he wasn’t all that good at sports. Maybe he struggled in math.
Do you often picture Jesus like that? Like someone you could have sat down with on the grass and just had a conversation with? Someone you could’ve run into while running errands in town? Someone who went to the doctor when he got sick, just like you?
And yet.
And yet, He was God in the flesh. Yahweh on earth.
Really push your imagination now. Picture yourself sitting down with Jesus. Average day, average conversation. Just you and your friend sitting down for lunch. It’s warm out. The sun is shining. A mosquito buzzes by your ear and you swat at it. You’re just talking. Good, relaxed, heart-to-heart conversation.
And it hits you. I mean, you know He’s the Son of God - Messiah. You’ve believed that for a while now. But sometimes, like lightning, it strikes you. This man? 2 feet from you? He’s…GOD. Maybe he’s 5’7” and 150 lbs. Maybe his hands are dirty and he’s a little sunburnt. Maybe he smiles and there’s food in his teeth. But he’s God. The God who created the universe in all of its variety and detail and color and wonder. He’s sitting with you. The world keeps spinning at 67,000 miles per hour around the sun because HE causes it to. Your cells are holding to each other because HE WILLS IT. You can only take your next breath to speak because the 5’7” man at your side gives it to you. On the other side of the planet, it’s snowing, and each snowflake is unique, because He made them that way. People laugh and cry around the globe and He hears every single one of them. He’s listening to you talk about the weather, but he knows every thought in the mind of every person at this precise moment. He’s 150 lbs but he holds the galaxies in place and he hung the earth on nothing.
Right now. He’s holding it all together. Carrying it along to its intended goal. Everything depends on the man sitting next to you. All of it. Can you fathom that? Can you comprehend that Jehovah God came to earth as a human being?
Now are you impressed?