I pedal up the grade on the overpass, then slow to a stop and peer down into the empty cars of a coal train as it rumbles past on the tracks below. If I leave home for this particular bike ride an hour before sundown, and ride energetically, I can do a favorite circuit and get to this high spot with its unobstructed view to the west a few minutes before the sun touches the horizon. The view is never the same twice.

While I was still riding toward the overpass a few minutes earlier, the sun was partially hidden by a broken cloud bank. Beams of glory emerged from the clouds and sliced the sky as if it were a giant pizza. Now, with the slow train rumbling below, the sun has turned red-orange and dropped below the cloud—wedged between the mist and a solid Nebraska horizon.

Overhead, a jet contrail points the way southwest. At its tip, a polished aluminum speck reflects the solar brilliance. The shiny speck disappears as a cloud comes between the sun and the plane. It reappears, then disappears again, as clouds and sun play upon the plane’s burnished surface.

The fiery solar ball seems to grow larger as it settles into the horizon. I hear a siren behind me. A fire truck appears, ascending the overpass from the east. I imagine the 911 call that roused the firefighters from their card game:

“How may I help you?”

“There’s a huge, hot fire out on the west end of Van Dorn Street. You’d better get somebody out there right away.”

“We’ll notify the fire department immediately.”

So the fire truck is now screaming past. Having slowed for a busy intersection, unable to gain speed as it climbs the overpass, the truck may not be making more than 15 mph as it heads west past me toward a fire 93 million miles away. This may take a while.

A few weeks ago a group of European astronomers announced they had found a star similar to our Sun that might possess an orbiting planet similar to our Earth. The star, Gliese 581, carries just the right gravitational force to maintain the planet, Gliese 581c, in just the right orbit. This produces a temperature range between 32 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit (about zero to 40 degrees Celsius) on 581c. That’s the temperature range of liquid water, so scientists think Gliese 581c might support oceans. “Life on the planet we have discovered is indeed possible,” says Xavier Bonfils of Portugal’s Lisbon Observatory. But does that matter?

Viewed from one perspective, the coal train, which has now disappeared up the tracks to the north, seems enormous. A train, after all, can crush solid copper pennies beyond recognition. When I was a child I was very impressed by that, and I thought trains were very big indeed. But viewed from a cosmic perspective, a train is a tiny tiny worm on an infinitesimal ball, in an apparently inconsequential solar system, in a galaxy so common there are billions of them. Is there other life out there? Sure, why not, if there are billions and billions and billions of possibilities? But, does it matter? 

The psalmist David may have been thinking of similar questions—even though he had never heard of Gliese 581c—when he wrote this:

When I consider 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,
       the son of man that you care for him?
       (Psalm 8:3-4, NIV).

The logical answer to that question, in the overall cosmic scheme of things, would appear to be that humans really don’t matter. Just think about the entire universe—as much as it is possible for a human to comprehend the incomprehensible—and ask why it would matter at all if one tiny spot in the Milky Way Galaxy did not support life.

Really. Why would it matter? I can’t come up with a logical reason. But love transcends logic, and so the apostle Paul wrote:

I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39, NIV).

If the One who created the universe says we matter to Him, that settles it for me. We matter.

An overpass is an interesting place to sit and think about fire trucks and trains and galaxies and God. I need to go back again sometime soon.

B.W.