A great aid to adoration

Late Wednesday night I was having trouble praying, and particularly praying in the way suggested by the mnemonic tool ACTS: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. My natural tendency is to supplicate a lot, sometimes confess and thank, but insufficiently adore. Maybe you also know that our God is great, but it's hard to get your arms around how great.

The greatest help to prayer laziness is Bible-reading, but I found a supplement that helped me the other night. Wait until you see "The Scale of the Universe 2" and learn that you can use the scroll bar to zoom in and out.

At the start you'll see the size of a standard human being compared to a dodo bird, a beach ball, a giant earthworm, a hummingbird, etc. Scroll up and we start to see smaller items, such as an ant and a sunflower seed, then a mist droplet and a white blood cell, then a strand of DNA and a hepatitis B virus, then hydrogen and helium atoms, then a charm quark and a bottom quark, and other things now invisible to us but not to God.

Scroll down and you'll see larger items such as Mount Everest and Halley's Comet, Mercury and Mars, Polaris and Aldebaran, the Eskimo Nebula and the Oort Cloud, the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex and the Sloan Great Wall, all the way to the end of the observable universe, although God can observe more.

Each item has a description. Young earth advocates will not like the billions-of-years dating assumptions of the galaxies and superclusters, but the website as a whole supports Psalm 8:

"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?"

One description at the outer edge explains:

"The Hubble Space Telescope took a picture of an empty spot in the night sky. Instead of nothingness, the image had almost 3,000 objects in it-distant galaxies."

The tiny as well as the gigantic praise God. Some descriptions charmingly tell us how God provides: Yes, a rogue E. coli serotype occasionally causes food poisoning, but here we learn that "E. coli are usually harmless and live in your intestines, making wonderful vitamin K2."

Psalm 8's conclusion:

"O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth."