Perspective (with thanks to NASA)

Perspective.  How we need it.  But how often do you step back from everyday life and see the big picture?

It's so easy to get wrapped up in the barrage of everyday stuff and lose perspective.  Take a shower, vacuum the living room, conquer the mountain of emails and phone calls, make dinner, pay the health insurance bill, get the oil changed, get some exercise...yeah, all that stuff.  It's real, it's how life goes, you have to take care of it.

The other day my brother showed me some stunning photos from a NASA website.  Every day they post a photo with an explanation written by an astronomer.  (If you want to blow your mind, just visit that site.)  Here's one that particularly struck me:

NGC 7293: The Helix Nebula
Image Credit & Copyright: Ed Henry (Hay Creek Observatory)

 

Explanation: A mere seven hundred light years from Earth, in the constellation Aquarius, a sun-like star is dying. Its last few thousand years have produced the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), a well studied and nearby example of a Planetary Nebula, typical of this final phase of stellar evolution. A total of 10 hours of exposure time have gone in to creating this remarkably deep view of the nebula. It shows details of the Helix's brighter inner region, about 3 light-years across, but also follows fainter outer halo features that give the nebula a span of well over six light-years. The white dot at the Helix's center is this Planetary Nebula's hot, central star. A simple looking nebula at first glance, the Helix is now understood to have a surprisingly complex geometry.

A "mere" 700 light-years from Earth?  It's so far away, it takes light (which travels at over 186 THOUSAND miles per second) seven hundred YEARS to get there?  And the inner region is so big that it takes light three years to get across it?

Our world is huge.  Massive.  Mysterious.  Stunning.  Awe-inspiring.  And the God with the power to come up with all this awesomeness is very interested in the goings-on of my little life today, Thursday, January 26, 2012.  (Designing a wedding album, meeting with seven piano students, sweeping the kitchen and making some egg salad.  Ah, such momentous tasks I have today.)

That's enough to make the most important person in the world shrink with humility, and bring honor to the most insignificant.  God knows the workings of your heart today...and he cares about every one of them.

Enough said.  :)  On to my list of to-do's--with renewed gratefulness and confidence!

- Kelsey

Discovering beauty... 

Kelsey Schweickert  |  San Francisco Bay Area wedding photographer
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