I've begun studying Earth's solar system -- the Sun, its eight planets (yeah, Pluto is demoted!), its three dwarf planets, and their 66 orbiting moons. It's jaw dropping.
But the principle of an orbit has intrigued me. We think in linear terms, yet without any center. Today I am learning that I am like these planets. I NEED to have an orbit, a primary grounding around which my life turns. Just as the Sun is the blazing center of this sytem, so the One True God is the blazing center of the Christian's system.
You simply cannot understand why Earth, or Saturn, or Eris are the way they are apart from understanding their relation to the Sun. So no one can begin to understand me as a believer apart from my relationship to the One True God, Jesus.
I've been learning to think this way from John Piper's teaching The Blazing Center: The Soul-Satisfying Supremacy of God in All Things. It's been helping me connect my happiness and God's glory as I learn that the only thing to truly make me (and others) happy is the Person of God himself.
So he blazes, and I orbit. I love to orbit him. The view is phenomenal. And he loves me to orbit him, for then he is constantly my grounding, my warmth, and my stability. I pity the wandering celestial body (an asteroid, I guess) that has no center. It is cold. Alone. Lifeless. How I long for that wandering asteroid will be sucked into our system. Our system will become a little more complex -- and complete. And that wandering planet will now also revolve around the Blazing Center. Soli deo gloria!
