This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

The other day I wrote that I needed the “head of a pin” to convey all I knew about a certain subject.

Well, today, I need a new pin.

On it, I would write all I know about the Webb Telescope, the one that, far away in the heavens, sends pictures back to earth of stuff that occurred billions of years ago.  Yes, billions!

Here is the way Washington Post columnist George Will wrote about Webb in a piece that appeared under a headline that I borrowed for this blog:

“Everything began, cosmologists currently think, with a bang — the Big Bang; if it does not deserve to be a proper noun, what does? — 13.7 billion years ago.  All the material in the universe, including us, is — literally — stardust (cue Nat King Cole’s rendition), meaning residues of the explosion.  

“The light gathered by Webb’s mirrors expands our knowledge of how stars form.  And perish:  This is not going to end well.

“Launched 13 months ago, Webb is orbiting 940,000 miles away.  With its 18 mirrors and its five sunshield layers unfolded, it is a tennis-court-size engineering masterpiece.  To function, each mirror must, after being hurled into space on a shuddering rocket, retain this exquisite precision:  If each mirror were the size of the continental United States, each should not vary more than two inches from perfect conformity with the others.”

Will goes on to write using, as usually is the case, stalwart prose, and good words.

All of this called to my memory a blog I wrote a year or so ago citing an editorial writer for the Arizona Republica who composed a thought-provoking piece including this statement:

“Peering into deep outer space, images from some 13 billion years ago, stirs not only our wonderment, but also takes us on a journey of spirituality.”

The writer, Phil Boas, went on to ask this probing question:  “Did the Webb Telescope show us the face of God?”

He didn’t directly answer the question, leaving readers with the option of doing so themselves.  But he did include incredible facts in his column, which I repeat here.

• “…what a patch of sky!  It includes a massive cluster of galaxies about four billion light-years away that astronomers use as a kind of cosmic telescope.  The cluster’s enormous gravitation field acts as a lens, warping and magnifying the light from galaxies behind it that would otherwise be too faint and faraway to see.”
• Through the Webb Telescope, mankind is seeing extremely distant galaxies “that stretch back to the beginning of time.  It’s a galaxy-finding machine.”
• A lonely speck in the cosmic dark:  This is the oldest documented light in the history of the universe from 13 billion years — let me say that again — 13 billion years ago.
• A billion is a number so large it is essentially an abstraction to the human mind.  Light that has traveled 13 billion light-years requires context so we can begin to understand it – see the next bullet.  
• Light moves at a speed of 670.6 million miles per hour.  A beam of light can travel approximately 6 trillion miles in a single earth year, according to Space.com.  At that speed, you could travel around the Earth 7.5 times in a single second.
• The numbers are staggering.  Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light-years across and contains some 100-400 billion stars, according to NASA.  Its size is too big to comprehend, but, within the context of the larger universe, it is smaller than a grain of sand.
• One of our neighboring galaxies is Andromeda. It is 220,000 light-years wide.  More than twice the size of our own.
• How many galaxies do you think there are?  NASA estimates 2 trillion. And if you can wrap your brain around that, ask yourself this question:  How many planets are there in all those galaxies?
• Too many planets to comprehend:  Roughly 700 quintillion — that’s 7 followed by 20 zeroes — 700,000,000,000,000,000,000.

My mind is boggled by these statistics, not to mention the photos produced by the telescope.

In the face of these numbers and photos, my eyes glaze over, not just my mind, which raises the need for a new “head of a pin.”

Then, to regain my composure, I return to my basic premise, a choice I presume to make:   It is that God created all of what we see and cannot see  –-  and I admire his handiwork, at least what I can understand of it.

And, more good news:  We can have a personal relationship with this very big God.

Does this mean, as some have suggested, that the Webb Telescope “allows us to see the face of God?”

I say “no.”

God is too big for a telescope, even a complicated and huge one like Webb, to reckon with God.  But what the telescope has produced provides this conclusion:  A glimpse into the past – yes, billions of years ago – when God created all we see and cannot see.