by Renée Darline Roden ’14, ’18 M.T.S

In the pitch-dark of late-May night, walking loudly along the sleepy paths of Seabrook Island, South Carolina, a group of young college graduates, myself among them, broke from the stuffy shadow of the palmetto trees onto a shimmering expanse of Atlantic beach.

The lamp-less beach was lit by stray atmospheric light reflecting off the deep waves and the lighter stretches of sand. As we wandered down the beach to the surf, eyes adjusting to the patchwork of darkness around us—the dark of the sand clashing with the dark movement of the ocean—I began to notice the source of the light.

The waves were dotted with tiny phosphorescent algae that bobbed in the foam on the waves that hit the shore. The algae reflected a light coming from above them. I looked up, and my eyes were greeted by the massive expanse of stars spread across the sky. My jaw dropped as my neck craned back to take in the entire shoreline of star-filled sky.

We sat on the beach, dipping our toes in the glowing foam and staring at the dazzling scrim of stars all around us.

That night on the beach in Seabrook was the first time I had ever seen—really seen—the full night sky. As a child of the Minneapolis suburbs, the only stars visible through the night sky of our well-lit neighborhood were the big constellations—Orion, Ursa Major—with enough wattage to make themselves seen through the light pollution of the metro area.

Current scientific calculations estimate that there are a septillion stars in the universe, that is 10 to the 24th power. From our earth, however, only 5,000 of those stars are visible, and, to a single human observer on the earth, even fewer can be seen at one time, since half of these stars are hidden by the earth itself. I was dazzled by the vision of a horizon drenched in stars, and I was only looking at the smallest fraction of the universe’s stars.

It is mind-boggling to recall that the beauty of this star-spangled universe constantly shines behind the opaque shield of our daylight-soaked atmosphere. As I go about my workday or sit on the hot summer afternoon sand, the stars are still there, still lighting up the dark of space. In the book of Genesis, this recollection of the night sky in the midst of day becomes a crucial image of faith.

In the twelfth chapter of Genesis, the biblical narrative finally introduces us to our famous Father Abraham. At this point in history, Abraham has not received his call from God and still goes by the name of Abram. God calls Abram and makes three promises: that he will bring him to a land that God will show him, he will make of him a great nation, and he will make Abram’s name great (Gen 12:1-3).

Despite this supernatural encounter with the divine, the next several chapters do not go spectacularly well for Abram. There is a famine in the land of Canaan (Gen 12:10), so Abram and his wife Sarah go to Egypt, where the Pharaoh takes Sarah as his wife (Gen 12:10-20). Then, Abram’s beloved cousin and cherished kinsman Lot is taken captive (Gen 14). Honestly, after God called Abram from the land of his ancestors into the land of Canaan, everything seemed to go downhill. Understandably, Abram is slightly shaken. God’s voice calls out again to Abram in a vision, offering encouragement: “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield” (Gen 15:1).

This time, Abram is a bit more skeptical of God’s promises. He asks for a sign that God will be faithful. God has made some pretty big promises and has delivered on none of them. “You have given me no offspring,” protests Abram (Gen 15:3), pointing to God’s unfulfilled promises. In response, God brings Abram outside of his tent and instructs him to look up to the sky. “Count the stars, if you are able,” God commands. As countless as the stars, he assures Abram, “so shall your descendants be” (Gen 15:5).

Abram does look at the stars, says Genesis. And he believes. Because of this faith, God “counts Abram as righteous” (Gen 15:6). God then invites Abram to make a covenant with him, to prove their mutual faithfulness.

Just a few verses later, the writer of Genesis sets the scene of  God and Abram beginning their covenant with this telling phrase, “as the sun was going down” (Gen 15:12). The sun has been shining throughout their previous dialogue and is only now about to set as they make their covenant together.

God brought Abraham outside the tent during the day, while the sun was still shining, and told him: “count the stars, if you are able.” Who is able to count any stars during the daytime? They, like Abraham’s yet-to-be-born descendants, are completely invisible. And yet, Abraham trusted. He trusted that, although he could not see the stars that he knew were there behind the blue curtain of the sky, although his wife was old and barren and he was nearing the end of his first century of living, Abraham trusted that he could believe God’s promise he would one day have children as firmly he believed—he knew—that he would see the stars appear that night.

I, too, also sometimes have a hard time believing that God will provide for me. Sure, says Sacred Scripture, God has plans for me, for my “welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (Jer 29:11). We are told over and over again to “trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding” (Prov 3:5), to take hold of the hand of God and to not be afraid (Is 41:13). But I still hesitate to put my hand completely in God’s and not still cling to the little life-preserver of my own understanding. I want to let some of my weight rest on my own power, because I doubt that God’s hand can hold me completely. I doubt that God’s version of my happiness is as fulfilling as my own version of my happiness. I fear God’s plans will include suffering—and my fears are somewhat justified, as God is not shy about advertising the fact that his friends are guaranteed crosses of their own—and I am really not interested in dying to myself or dying, period.

While claiming to trust God, I usually work overtime to make sure that I am creating my own happiness, that I am setting up enough contingency plans and safety nets so that I will never be left disappointed by God’s plans. I definitely need God to help out, sure, but I really would rather not find myself in the position of having to really, truly, fully rely on God, to have to surrender all my plans to him.

But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless.

What sign can you give me, O Lord God, that you are faithful, that I can put my trust in you?

Somehow, ever since that night at Seabrook, I have gotten it in my head that if I see the night sky like that again, covered end-to-end with stars, I will know that I have found happiness. When I think of the night sky full of stars over the Atlantic Ocean, I feel a promise well up inside my heart as certain as covenant: God has promised me happiness and God is faithful to his promises. The vision of the glowing ocean and the seemingly infinite pin-points of light dotting the dark sky has become a sign of God’s promise to me—a promise to love and care for me, a promise that my life, like those stars, is something brilliant and beautiful, part of a larger vision of beauty than I could ever imagine on my own.

Since that summer, I have yet to see again the stars spread out across the sky. But each time I look up at the sky above me—the cloudy banks of February in Manhattan, the oppressive ceiling of the South Bend permacloud in winter, or the crystal-clear skies above Minnesota marshes in the spring—I know that the stars are there.

The God who made the sun, the planets and these stars promised one man in a small village on the desert plains of prehistoric Israel that he would not leave him childless. The God who made this glorious symphony of galaxies also made you and me and never tires of calling out to us, of sending signs, of going to great lengths to assure us that he is faithful to his covenant, in both the day and night.

Image Credit: Dave Morrow, “The Night Watch” via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)