21 cm

Hope can see heaven through the thickest clouds.- Thomas Benton Brooks

If you haven't seen the video 'Indescribable,' I highly recommend it. Louie Giglio uses astronomy pictures of the amazing, indescribable universe that our God has created to help us see how big God is and how small we truly are. He also uses an audio clip of a pulsar taken using a radio telescope, which is even dearer to me now because I spent a week using a 40-ft radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. The universe is crying out in ways I've barely begun to explore. Noe, while the audio can be more impressive, you can make images or map regions in the sky based on their emission of waves at the frequency you're observing at, which was one of the projects of my week participating in ERIRA (Educational Research in Radio Astronomy, don't ask me to pronounce it).
I actually got to make a whole observation by myself while everyone else was on a hike. I was observing the Crab Nebula and the region of space around it. I can show everyone my strip chart, a physical recording of the data I took. On it you can clearly see the Crab Nebula as a large couple of spikes near the beginning and later the moon which spikes off the chart. If you look at the chart between the two bigger events you can see small spikes that make the data look like the top of Batman's masks, which made me think of camp (though I never quite understood why we picked Batman to be our superhero... anyway...) and in the middle of m data you can see a bunch of messed up data when the weed-eaters came by and I had to put that to a stop. I think it was right over a supernova remnant too, sadly.
The point of this sojourn into the world of radio telescope data is that I was by myself, turning a knob back and forth to make the telescope do sweeps of the sky to get a map of this region for three hours. Three hours of turning the knob, doing something for a few minutes before the computer with the nice green screen and red letters beeped at me to tell me to turn the telescope around. When you're there with a group of people, you converse and get to know them better and it's a fun time, except when you're sleep deprived. When you're by yourself, it can get tediuous and since I really hadn't taken a second to do it before, I brought my devotional with me. I opened it to the last time I read something (I was a few days behind- days tend to get a little confused when you sleep at the wrong time, I think) and the next day's devotion was just on the other page. I turn my eyes to the other page and the quote at the top of this note is a little side qoute listed right under the scripture that goes along with the message. And it just floored me. Professor Reichart kept on saying the whole week that this is what the universe would look like if you had 'radio eyes' which I thought was lame at the time. There are enough good things to see here, with the eyes we have. Why would we need radio eyes? The greathing about radio astronomy is that you can see things that other people can't. If a star explodes behind a dust lane, you don't see it in the visual, the wavelength is too short and it's blocked by the dust. But it still emits in the radio end of the spectrum and radio waves pass through the dust. Using a radio telescope allows you to see through the clouds in space to something that's giving off marvelous light.
So when God put that quote in front of me, that "[h]ope can see heaven through the thickest clouds," I kinda wanted to jump up and down and dance for Him and I wouldn't have expected me to. I hate the word 'hope.' I hate the idea of hope. Hope is the thing that trusting people have, the quality that allows them to put their trust, their whole heart into something with the idea that their trust will be rewarded, that they won't have hoped for no reason. Hope is a characteristic of the naive and I strive to be anything but naive. So I hated hope, especially since hope is what broke my heart last year and hope is what's tearing at it now. But my Lord had just placed it in front of me, so I figured I'd better have another look at it, in light of what I was doing right then. How did we, astronomically and scientifically, see through the clouds? We looked at the universe in a different way, at a different wavelength. We built different telescopes. We had 'radio eyes.' How can I see past the things that distract me here, the things that scream the injustice of the world and the things that rip out my heart? How do I see past the child whose father won't see her for the wonderful, truly amazing person she is, who won't even calim her? How do I see past the girl who is still in a group home, waiting to be adopted even though she's the sweetest, kindest child you've ever met? How do I even begin to get past the lives destroyed by war, for whatever reason? Hoe do I see past my selfishness, my pain, the things that make me want to run from my Lord insto of to Him? These things that tear me up, that break the heart of my Father, how do I see past them? How do you hope when you know that there are children out there two steps away from joining a gang, who are pulled down by everything the world has to throw at them, who have no safe or love-filled home? How do you hope for them, to see past the clouds that block out heaven?
Hope isn't what I've made it out to be. It's not some mystical trait or some mysterious feeling. It's a different way of looking at the world. It's seeing the world in light of the goodness still to come. It's changing your eyes so you can go through the clouds (they're not going to magically leave, that's not what Christ has promised us), so you can see through to the marvelous, glorious light that waits for us. Hope is knowing that there is going to be a better day, even if it's not tomorrow or the next day or the next day. One day my God is going to make things just and fair on that day my Savior is going to rain grace down again on me and take me back home. you just have to have hope, to see the Universe a little different (OK, a lot different). When we can see heaven, we can work to make this messed up, fallen world more like heaven, no matter how hopeless this place is. I'm going to hope for tomorrow because I can see what I hope for, I can see that the kingdom that's going to replace this one is worth working, striving, dying for now.