The North Star

I love space. My wife shakes her head everytime I look up at the sky and say, "I want to go up there so bad." From my childhood days of peering through a telescope with my dad to my young teen years taking pictures of the moon and Jupiter through my telescope and now to my constant monitoring of the space program, I am fascinated by the Heavens. I want to see them. I can't imagine the breathtaking experience of visiting another planet.

With my telescope, I've seen the rings of Saturn. I've stared at the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. I've seen our red little brother, Mars. I've tried desperately (but failed) to see the nebulas of Orion's belt. Seeing the moon with a telescope is stunning. Its features look like mountains and plains instead of light and dark spots. I've seen pictures of Uranus and Neptune from Voyager I and II. I've heard the whistling of alien winds on Titan, a moon of Saturn. I'll never forget seeing the first pictures of the Martian Rovers...I love the universe, and I sometimes wonder if NASA needs chaplains for its first trip to Mars!

However, there's been one thing in my limited understanding that I always thought was overrated. The North Star. It's small looking, not very bright, and it is pretty plain. You always here people excited to point out the North Star, but I inwardly always thought, "Bah, who cares." Until recently...

The Hubble Telescope recently discovered that Polaris, the North Star, is actually a Triplet Star. It is a massive yellow giant with two other stars orbiting it! This ho-hum star went from boring to amazingly interesting. There was more there than I thought.

The North Star is called such because it is almost fixed on the Earth's polar north. It doesn't move in the sky that much. It is constant. While the stars in Orion, Scorpio, Drago, even the Big Dipper have their seasonal positions, the North Star stays put. For this reason, humans have looked to the North Star as a compass. It was the sure direction finder at sea when there were no other landmarks.

I was wrong. The North Star is a big deal. Not only is it astronomically interesting, it has guided human history. For some of us God is like that. We're not real excited about it. It seems like something to do on Sundays for a few folks who we're not sure are any better than us. It seems boring and uninteresting. But, then we see it. We get it. We experience God, and our perspectives change...We make God the center focus of our lives, and we live by His light. I remember vividly the night Jesus became the center and my compass for life. Jesus is my North Star, and by his light I sail my ship.

What is your North Star? What do you look to to guide you on the seas of life? What gives you assurance that you are headed in the right direction? Len Sweet in his book Aqua Church encourages us to see Jesus as our North Star, a guiding light in the darkness. When all else is spinning out of control, Jesus remains steady, leading us home.

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 display knowledge
their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world(s).
- Psalm 19:1-4