Shouts from a Mayfly

Every year my favorite magazine, Scientific American, puts out a special single topic publication. It’s not a regular issue, isn’t even on newsstands... it's something a little extra for guys like me. I look forward to getting them each December. This year’s issue is called “The Cosmic Life Cycle: Origins of the Universe.”

I have been reading stuff like that for a long time, and I always like getting more. Each time I read such articles it becomes a little clearer, a little more cohesive. I polish my understanding of the universe a little more. It is very exciting.

One cool thing about the articles in Scientific American is that they aren’t written by staff writers. The articles (not the columns of course) are written by the scientists who are actually doing the research, the experiments, analyzing the data, examining the evidence. It’s a front row seat to modern scientific thought.

To me it is thrilling knowing that our telescopes have found light that has been traveling toward us for over 14 billion years. It is a wondrous window into a time not long after the Creation.

The universe was so much different then. Galaxies were more egg shaped,, and made up of stars so much larger that they burned up their fuels in just aa few hundred thousand years. Andd in their death rattles breathed new, heavier, materials into the universe, into us. It was different then...

No heavy metals, just pretty much hydrogen and helium... galaxies weren’t the complex swirls we have today...


and there still washes over us the echo of the earlier enormous shout the universe gave as it cooled to the 3,000 degrees celsius necessary for electrons and protons to grab onto each other and begin the dance we call hydrogen.

(Patience please. I’m going somewhere with this.)

The universe is a rather improbable place. There is an amazing balancing act between the four laws of physics which permits such dances of physical material... and permits the formation and combustion of stars, and eventually the complex chemical interactions which has brought about the unlikely event of a fellow like myself tapping away at this plastic keyboard before a glowing screen.

There are further improbabilities as well. Galaxies are the natural source for the materials needed for life, but they don’t provide many hospitable places for us. It may be that most galaxies have inhospitable maelstroms at their centers, gigantic black holes spewing intense radiation through the small amount of material they spill off their enormous plates as they consume everything within reach.



It is fortunate that there are small eddies of relatively quiet backwaters where stars like our own can glide along and throw a solar umbrella over their tiny systems.

But as rare as that is, there are still at least 100 billion billion stars very much like our own.

All this complexity came out of the nearly perfectly smooth conditions of the early universe (the variation in the early universe was only ONE part per 100,000!). It was an orderly beginning of an imaginable hot well-stirred soup.

(Still with me?)

So, in this improbably fragile universe filled with enormous powers which gobble up stars like popcorn, we exist. Tiny creatures in a universe nearly 15 billion years old, and praying to the God of it all.

(Here it comes.)

Imagine the power and wisdom and majesty of mere servants of the Creator, angels, who have served Him before creation began.

Now imagine that their master, the being of pure love and power and glory beyond my ability to praise, is consoling me about my wife who is passed out in the bedroom after falling off the wagon.

Imagine that the God which sings the universe into existence strengthens me as I feed my children, and console my wife who, for the first time in recent memory told me, “I’m sorry,” and meant it. (She has also said some ugly things which demonstrate how much she is hurt, damaged.)

This being who glides through time as if it were nothing at all, pauses to tell me I am loved, as I helped my wife up from her place beside the toilet.

Part of me is very fearful.

Part of me is ready to jettison my marriage if it becomes clear that my wife is so bent on self-destruction that I cannot help her.

Part of me rejoices that my wife appears to be hitting bottom. Perhaps she might now look up.

Or perhaps not.

She thinks God is to blame for everything.

I know it has been our choices which have created the messes we all live in. The choices I make. The choices those close to us have made. And the choices of those we have never met.

I don’t know what to do right now. My heart is racing.

But I know that even though I live less than a hundred years, there are mighty beings, a triune God, who is listening to the shouting of this mayfly.