One caller asked how the experience had changed him spiritually, and Anders said he didn't really want to go into that. He talked about how small the earth seemed, and it didn't take much in the way of math skills to think about how small it would seem from even further away.
He said, "So one thing that impressed me, even though the earth is physically insignificant, it certainly is important to humanity, but it also is very small . . We go around a rather insignificant star called the sun in a relatively insignificant galaxy; we're not the center of the universe . . . we definitely are out on the edge of almost nowhere in space."
I thought of all of our recent Advent and Christmas readings and about how God comes to us by way of some of the most insignificant people of the first century: a first century Jewish woman (so many lower levels of status contained in that description) who lives in Palestine, a distant outpost of the Roman empire. And now, I'll always think of an even larger perspective: God comes to us on our tiny planet in an insignificant solar system which is part of an insignificant galaxy.
I'm thinking about the larger message, about insignificance as a spiritual gift. It's the time of the year when many of us start beating ourselves up for what we haven't accomplished in the past year. It's the time of year when we make resolutions, most of which are designed to make us more significant, not less.
This year, let us embrace our insignificance and let us remember that God often uses insignificance to make major revelations.
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