Baptist Spirituality

Hello, everyone! My name is Rocket, and I’m so happy to be spending time with Joe the last two weeks of sabbatical. Over the next few days we are at Disney getting some “down time,” which is fun because we have been praying and reading and writing A LOT!

When we were at Magic Kingdom today, I got to stop in my favorite restaurant, Cosmic Ray’s. If you look closely at the picture below, you will see ole’ Ray’s one and only paid entertainer, “Sonny Eclipse”, singing in the background. He is a fun guy (or whatever he is)!

At first I thought “cosmic rays” was just a gag, but when I studied my history of the universe, I realized that cosmic rays are a real “thing.” You see, back in the 1930s, when astronomers were gaining new insights about the universe, people believed that cosmic rays stretched to every corner of space.

One astronomer, Father Georges LeMaitre (he was a priest too!) wrote about the Big Bang theory and believed that the origins of the universe created such a powerful blast that there still might be shockwaves — cosmic rays — in space.

Father LeMaitre was in the military before he was a priest, you see, and he was injured in battle. I suppose that he might have learned that energy from very large explosions leave radioactive signatures. At the time, Father LeMaitre could not be sure, so he did not study his idea about cosmic rays.

It took over 30 years, in 1964, for scientists to have the technology to discover those shockwaves. Two such scientists in New Jersey were listening to radio waves from across the United States when they also heard a constant noise signal coming from … well, EVERYWHERE!

They pointed their big radio dish (it was more like a HORN) to the moon, and there was a hiss. They pointed it to the stars, hiss! They pointed it at nothing — hiss! They even pointed it at each other. Nothing but ONE BIG HISS!

They measured the temperature of the hiss and realized it was radiation blanketing the entire universe!! The “cosmic rays” that Father LeMaitre theorized in 1930 came true in the form of “cosmic background radiation” leftover by none other than the BIG BANG!

Just think: When GOD spoke the universe into existence, with all of that power needed to create everything we know — all of the galaxies, the stars, atoms, everything — there was so much POWER in one DIVINE WORD that radiation was leftover from the energy.

You want to know what is even more cool? If you turn on one of those old television sets (no, not the flat screens) and put on a station of static, you can pull in the very signal from the cosmic background radiation, which makes up about 3% of what you see and hear.

The ECHO of GOD’S WORD can be pumped right into your home just by turning on STATIC!

So, yeah, cosmic rays are a real thing. And when I visited Ray and Sonny today, I was reminded of this wonderful scientific fact that shows just how real and how AMAZING God is when God spoke all creation into existence. Cool, right?