One night on a recent camping trip with a mate, I found myself lying in a clearing of soft short grass staring up at the stars.
It was one of those great clear nights where the stars filled the inky black sky and screamed for attention. And as I lay there on the chilly ground, feeling philosophical and contemplative, I had one of those moments like when an ink-blot picture suddenly becomes an octopus juggling top-hats. For the briefest of seconds, even though my puny brain couldn’t quite grasp the enormity of it, I got a perspective of the bigness – the absolute mind-boggling vastness – of space. No matter which way you look at it, space is really, really big.
Author Bill Bryson illustrates the scale of things nicely in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything. He suggests that if the earth is the size of a pea, Pluto would be 2.5 kilometres away (and the size of a bacterium), and our nearest star would be 16,000 kilometres away. It is so far away it would take 25,000 years for you to get there by spaceship.
But the enormity doesn’t stop there. Not only are those twinkling lights a long way away, they are also amazingly huge. Our own sun, for example, could fit well over a million earths inside it. All of a sudden as I lay there under the night sky, my own little world started to feel utterly and hopelessly insignificant. As a six-foot carbon-based life-form with an approximate life span of seventy years, I was a nothing, a smudge, a quark lying on a dust particle floating in the infinite ocean of creation.
And so there I lay, crushed by the total perspective that I was not, after all, the centre of the universe. In the scale of all creation, my life amounted to …  zip. But right then into my head came some reassuring thoughts.
Even in the midst of all this majesty and general enormousness, it was God himself who created the heavens and the earth. It was God who (in the words of Psalm 139) knitted me together in my mother’s womb, who saw me in the secret place, who knew me and ordained all of my days before I even came to be. And it was God – the creator of all that vast wonderful and fearful space – who wonderfully and fearfully made me. And on top of that, out of all the infinity of creation, it was Jesus who thought that I (and my fellow humans) was important enough to die for.
Suddenly I didn’t feel so small any more. I had been given a quick glimpse of the unimaginable size of creation, and there in the middle of it all … a little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, that says, “You are here, but don’t worry …  God is too.”

Peter Downey’s new book Inspired Stuff (co-written with Ben Shaw) is available from Christian booksellers.