Personality Pollution

National Geographic reported last week that 80% of people living in the US cannot see the Milky Way galaxy at night. Because of light pollution (lights shining brightly enough at night to prevent us from seeing the night sky well), 80% of our population cannot see a structure of over 200 billion stars spanning 120,00 light years across. It's not that you can't see it in 80% of our geography, but where the population concentrates, so does light pollution, hiding 200 billion stars from nearly all of us.

Lamenting light pollution is not my purpose. Rather, I want to posit the question of what this is doing to our personalities.

Depending on when and where you grew up, you may have been able to enjoy laying on your front lawn or on the hood of a car, staring up at the night sky, and seeing a dark sky filled with stars. Which one is the North Star again? Oh, there it is! There's the Big Dipper, and that one is the Little Dipper. Can you find Orion? And sooooo many!

Never in my life have a I seen as many stars in the sky as I have out in the Wachara village in Western Kenya. No light pollution at all, and a sky literally filled with stars. I tried to get a picture, but didn't have the right equipment (so I'll post a picture from the Internet capturing what I was able see with just the naked eye):

The other thing we did while lying on the hood of the car staring at the stars was ponder our existence. How vast the universe! How small I am. How great is the Creator! How amazing that the One who made this would take any notice of little ol' me. I'm not as important as I thought. I fit into a tiny timeslice of a much larger reality, a much grander narrative. I'm nothing, but now I'm something because the Creator knows my name. The stars in the sky gave us a platform to consider the significance and meaning of our own existence. And we did this as kids.

The vast ocean and foreboding mountains can spur these thoughts, too, but even they are itty bitty dots compared to that sky! Nothing else we can see with our own eyes exposes our minuscule existence like the stars at night.

But what if you never get to see them, like 80% of the people in America today? What if you aren't reminded almost every night of every summer that you're nothing because of Creation and that you're something because of the Creator? What happens to your view of self, your view of the world, your view of Creation, and your view of the Creator if you never get to see his biggest masterpiece? What happens to your ego, your sense of purpose, your idea of significance, and your part in the narrative? Do you even see at all that there is a narrative? Light pollution will only increase, driving us well above 80% - what will be the increasing effect on our personalities?

The Bible uses "the stars in the sky" to refer to the vastness of other things. But if you've never really seen the vastness of the stars, can you even read these passages accurately? This phrase is intended to make your jaw drop, but if your jaw has never dropped at the sky, you're more likely to be ho hum than stunned when you read.

(source: http://www.universetoday.com/22285/facts-about-the-milky-way/)

What will we do? Our Creator has put on display for us a stunning view of who we are and who we are not, but we've blinded ourselves from seeing it. And our children will see it even less, and perhaps be hampered from struggling to see how they fit into a vast universe. Unless we bundle them up and take them to see what only 20% of Americans can see on any given night.