Genesis 1:2-3

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

Way back in 1968, at Christmas time, the astronauts of Apollo 8 hung in space somewhere between earth and the moon.  On Christmas Eve, Commander Frank Borman made a broadcast back to earth in which he read the verses above.  They trained the camera on the earth and it showed a small blue and white ball hanging over an infinite abyss of Nothing.  Everything  we have ever known and loved, all the people who ever lived (including our Lord himself), all the things that ever happened that really matter to us, everything that will happen in the lives of you and me, were back there on this small small ball.  Some people felt this made the earth “insignificant” since it is just a speck in that ocean of space.  But the earth is small, not like a squashable bug is small, but like home is small.  Earth is an intimate place and the light God sends to shine on it is ordinary, like daylight, not exotic, like “stellar radiation.”  St. Paul understood this and recognized God, the author of plain light, wherever he saw him.  That was why he told the Corinthians, “It is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).  Let that light shine in and through you today too.