“…while the morning stars sang together and all the angels a shouted for joy…”
Job 38:6-7

​It was a Summer night in 1982. I was 14 and on a family vacation in the mountains of upstate New York. I lay on a large, rubbery pool float the campground people had left on the grass beside a raised embankment. In the sky above was an infinity of stars twinkling silently from the velvety depths of space. I struggled to match the beauty and wonder of what I saw with scenes imagined from my favorite fiction books. Anything I could envision fell short of the glory I beheld.

My mind drifted to larger, timeless questions. I wondered whether God was indeed real and the Creator of all things. How could the earth and everything in it come into existence otherwise? And all those stars and planets and everything they contained, how could they have appeared from a bang of what, dust? Where did that come from? How could everything have come from nothingness?

And then it seemed I might find out. The stars drew a little closer, and I felt weightlessness. I was airborne and began to tumble in the air. What the…?

Just as suddenly as confusion hit me, I hit the ground, hard. Very painfully. It was shocking and stunned me. My body hurt in several places all at once, but nothing seemed broken. I spent a long minute just breathing and getting a grip on reality. That’s when I heard laughter in the darkness.

My younger sister and brother stood on the rubbery pool bag, doubling over in glee, laughing uncontrollably. They’d jumped together from the top of the embankment in a maneuver calculated to bring about my demise, or at least as a mean joke. They’d hit the end of the float with about a hundred tons of force, and I’d been launched skyward, landing about twenty feet away. Any deep, existential thoughts were wiped from my mind. At that moment, my only reason for existence was to exact my revenge. In hindsight, I can’t remember whether I ever did.

I lost something that night. Looking up at the stars never seemed to be the same, never brought that same depth of awe and wonder. That was ever behind me, dwindling into a past that became harder to recall with each passing season. Maybe the darkly amusing memory from that Summer in the mountains had somehow eclipsed it. Or perhaps it was just the quiet death of innocence that happens to most of us in the journey through adolescence. Most of us come through it with a scar or two.

And I had my scars. Hard knocks and the consequences of my teenage foolishness had shaped me into a restless, unsteady, and troubled soul. I’d become a passive nihilist given to moments of spontaneous stupidity. Although my heart was often tender, and I still cared deeply for others, my moods would change with the winds, and I’d impulsively act out from hurts too deep for me to acknowledge.

For years afterward, my life was heading steadily downward. I knew it. Things went from bad to worse, and I didn’t know how to turn it all around. It took a season of personal distress and a very near-death experience to make me desperate enough to cry out to God. When He responded by miraculously, blessedly healing me, I learned that He does indeed exist. My answered prayers were the proof.

From that point, my stubbornness became a drive to climb up and out of the pit I’d been living in. I was determined to live a better life. And as I made better, saner choices, things turned around. There were still bumps here and there, but life began to hold more meaning. I hoped things could turn out well, but I wasn’t sure what that would look like.

Some may have expected that I’d become religious after such an experience. I’m not sure whether I even had a Bible. I did pray at times, usually when I was anxious about something. Mostly, I was thankful to have been healed but also puzzled by it. I couldn’t understand the how or why of it, so I took it as a “Great Correction” of my life and went from there. My way of living became based on a fuzzy notion about justification through good works. Maybe we were created to do as much good as possible, so we should aim to offset whatever bad stuff we did with what good we could muster. I did not understand God’s love and grace or much about anything from the Bible. But that didn’t stop me from trying my best to be and do good when I wasn’t rationalizing whatever wrong or selfish thing I sometimes chose to do.

Eventually, my standard of living was far above the low roads I’d traveled early on. I was in my second marriage and doing well in my technology career, and I thought my life was pretty close to perfect. I’d come up with a dream for myself to someday make it into outer space. At least to buy a tourist ticket on someone’s rocket or maybe as a volunteer settler for a lunar colony. If I worked hard enough, who knew? Perhaps I’d even be able to start my own space company. Either way, if I could somehow get “up there,” I might find the answers to all the questions I had “down here.” The one wrinkle was that I couldn’t picture how my wife and children fit in with my plans to conquer space and find some answers to the BIG questions.

I recall boasting one evening at Happy Hour that with just a little work in my marriage, I could declare my life a success and that I was on my way toward attaining my delusionally lofty goals. And it had all come to pass because of God, of course, because He’d made me good enough to do it on my own.

And, of course, that’s when things crashed. You’d think I might have learned by then. Like so many other times, my foolish pride was my downfall. (It seems like I’ve read somewhere something about pride going before a fall…)

In a heartbeat, everything in my life changed. It looked like I would lose everyone and everything I cared about and maybe die, too—everything I said or did made things worse.

I’ve written other times about this next event, but it ties in with that Summer night from so long ago in ways worth mentioning. So many things in my life now flow from what happened…

One Friday night, the day after Thanksgiving, I stood very alone on the River Walk in San Antonio. It was around eight pm, and there wasn’t another soul in sight. I guessed that everyone was out on Black Friday shopping or spending time with family, which hurt my heart to think about because the future of my own family was uncertain. This tormented all my thoughts and fears about it and what might happen. I hadn’t eaten or slept much for days and had to get out of my hotel room and find something to eat, somewhere to go, somehow to get my mind off everything that was happening.

When I made it out to the River Walk, I took a few steps in a likely direction and stopped. I didn’t know where I wanted to go or what to do. Stress and anxiety and whatever else was wrong with me had me feeling continually weighed down as though by a ton of stones, and on the inside, I felt sick and thought I might be dying. The worst part was that my mind was always going nonstop at the best of times, and it was a whirling mass of confusion. Half-formed thoughts and ideas conflicted with whatever train of thought I would try to follow.

I looked up. There were a few clouds here and there in the night sky, and I saw a star or two shining. A memory from long ago came to me, of looking up at the sky and wondering… and then I remembered when I’d been deathly ill, dying, years earlier. How I’d prayed, and God had answered me. I was pretty sure about it, but I knew that I hadn’t been living my life in a way that was worthy of Him.

Now, I was again in trouble, just as bad or, in some ways, worse than I had been then. I’d been reading my Bible for a couple of years, thumbing it open randomly most evenings and reading a paragraph or two. And it had been making some sense. Plus, odd things happened along the way that I couldn’t explain. I didn’t think or speak much about them; when I did, I just categorized them as “God things” that I couldn’t wrap my mind around.

Seeing that I was at the end of my rope, I made the same choice again. I called out to God in prayer. It wasn’t much of a prayer, but it was earnestly from my heart, spoken while looking up in a direction that was my best guess for the direction of Heaven.

And God answered in a miraculous, unmistakable, unforgettable, unfathomable, incomprehensible way. He took everything up and off of me; all the stress, fear, anxiety, sickness… and noise in my head went silent all at once. Then, a profound peace overcame me, an indescribable sensation that wasn’t felt but experienced as it enveloped me. I don’t think it lasted long. When I thought again to move and remembered to breathe, everything was different, especially within me. I had tasted and seen that the LORD is indeed good. His peace surpasses all understanding.

Three weeks later, I’d had a rough day and was desperately trying to sleep. But scripture I didn’t know that I knew kept coming clearly to mind whenever I closed my eyes. It was as though someone was trying to tell me something if I would only listen. So, three times, I read the book of Romans from the Bible because that’s where much of the scripture was from. After the third time, something gave way in my heart, and I knelt at my bedside, prayed, and spent some time waiting on the Lord. I received faith, a certainty of belief in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as my Lord and Savior. I committed my life to Him that night, rejoicing and praising God in His name.

The following day, I was out driving somewhere very early. As the sun was coming up, I was struck by the glorious sunrise. I wept at the beauty, the handiwork of my God, awed by his works and overwhelmed with his love. I knew then that I was in a new place, in what I could only understand as a new relationship with Him through Jesus.

Not long after that day, I found myself noticing the sky and clouds a lot, struck by how lovely it was to behold. I thought back and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d really looked up at the sky. I’d lived for years without ever looking up, keeping my eyes constantly on the ground when outside. Whether from shame or guilt or fear, I don’t know. But I do know that I have been truly set free. I was like a prisoner released from a dark dungeon, at last walking unbound beneath a wide-open sky. I had been set free through faith in Jesus Christ because of God’s great love for me, you, and every living soul.

That was many years ago, and I haven’t forgotten what God has done for me. I still thank and praise Him, seek to grow in knowing Jesus Christ, and follow God’s will for my life.

And ever since then, I have taken the opportunity to look up at the night sky and behold with wonder all the stars and the works of God’s hands. I experience the same joy I’d had as a boy, my heart untroubled and resting in Christ. I do not need to look for answers “up there” in the heavens because I’ve learned that Jesus came “down here” so that we all might know the TRUTH and experience God’s love and peace for ourselves. My questions have been answered through the Word of God and his love in Jesus Christ, and I am at peace.

God, by his will and word, has made and arranged every one of those twinkling lights in the sky, each with its own distinct glory. And you and I have just as surely been uniquely created and called by Him to live here and now according to His purpose.

Have you yet called upon God in Jesus’s name? If not, what are you waiting for?