DON KLAASSEN
Scale model

I knew the shape and sound. The shoe-sized box with its telltale rattle of tiny plastic pieces inside could only mean one thing. I was getting another scale model kit for my birthday! I tore open the package and quickly began organizing the tiny pieces in preparation for assembly. Time flew by as I immersed myself in construction of the model. Once completed, models became the focus of my vivid imagination. What would it be like to own a real 1932 Ford Roadster or to be a sailor on a Coast Guard cutter? Things that were too big and too complex for my child’s world seemed understandable as scaled down models.

These days, I am fascinated with a scale model of our solar system and universe. If I imagine our sun to be a sphere slightly larger than a basketball, then earth in the same scale would be about the size of an uppercase O, and the moon would be a bit larger than the period at the end of this sentence. Using this model, the moon would be revolving around the earth at a distance of nine centimetres, and the sun would be 30 metres away. Pluto would be the size of a grain of sand more than a kilometre away from the sun. The nearest star would be 8,000 kilometres away. Some stars in our galaxy are so large that even in this scale they would be 2 kilometres in diameter. Our galaxy is home to hundreds of billions of stars. Using our sun as an average size, 200 billion scaled down stars would easily fill up 40 average football stadiums to the top row of seats. Beyond our galaxy, there are millions of other galaxies. Even scaled down, the numbers of stars, the size of the universe and the complexity of it all are impossible for me to comprehend.

Think about this for a moment. Then remember that the Bible says all of this was created by God – a God who is as much greater than the universe as the universe is greater than I am. God is that awesome – and you don’t have time for God?