I See the Stars, I Hear the Mighty Thunder

I don’t see the stars.

Hyacinth and me hadn’t thought about me posting on this site, but when this topic came up, I told her I wanted to write this post, and not use a discussion format.

Thankfully, WordPress allows multiple authors on every site, so it’s easy.

While I don’t see the stars, I know about them. When I was a kid, sometimes my friends would look at the sky and tell me what constellation they were looking for. I must have asked what stars were, and I understand they’re basically points of light in Heaven.

The title of this post is a line from the hynm “How Great Thou Art.” The believer is saying that the stars and thunder are evidence of God. I don’t need to see stars to know that God is real. If I couldn’t hear thunder, I’d still believe. I believe because God and Jesus Christ are in my heart, not because of any part of the universe.

I also don’t think I would want proof of God’s existence. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it would be too scary, or maybe it would be boring. If we knew what God was, we’d stop searching for answers. We’d give up, and we’d ultimately die, because there would be nothing left for us to do.

That hymn is also about beauty and enjoying God’s universe: “when I, in awesome wonder, / Consider all the world Thy hands have made.” In that sense, the stars and the thunder are part of the beauty of everything. Without seeing the stars, I can still appreciate the companionship I had with my friends as a child. I could listen to them talking and ask them and their parents questions. A sighted child might not have had any reason to talk to their friends’ parents, but I did, because the adults could explain better. That was my way of harnessing the beauty of the stars, without needing to see them.

God gives us all what we have, and we must do our best with it. That may include coming up with technology that will one day allow blind people to see the stars, but the vast majority of blind people don’t spend their waking hours wishing for that day. We enjoy the universe as everyone else does.