Hong Kong, featuring Two ibc
The other morning three-year-old Atticus noticed a little winged insect on the car door. He wanted me to kill it. (Boys!)
I told him that the bug wouldn’t do anything to hurt him; it didn’t have a stinger and would just fly off as soon as we started moving, if not before.
Offended at the depths of the bug’s imposition, he wanted to know why that bug was on our van. The bug probably didn’t even know it was a car, I told him as I buckled his car seat belt. He may think it’s another tree or something.
He can’t see the big picture like we can.
Think about how many times bigger than that little bug we are, I told Attie. Think about how small his brain must be. Does he even see us for what we are? Maybe we’re just moving mountains to him. Maybe he sees no further than that gray bit of MPV door he’s lit sideways on. Maybe all that we are is just a blur in his tiny little vision.
I’m not sure how much Attie understood of our conversation. He had his serious, crinkled-brow look on. He nodded gravely that the bug is indeed one of God’s creatures: “ExACTly, Mommy.”
But it got me thinking.
What’s our equivalent of that little bug to us? We don’t have one in real life, not a “live” one, anyway. Even a nine-feet-tall giant like the biblical Goliath wouldn’t compare, right?
Okay . . . I’m 5’4″ or so. That’s about 64 inches. That little insect was maybe 1/4 inch tall, and I’m being generous. So there are more than 256 of him in one of me. And 256 times my height is 16,384 inches. Divided by 12, that’s more than 1,365 feet or 416 meters. Wow.
So how does that compare?
Well, let’s try some skyscrapers!
I’ll start with New York’s 102-storeyed Empire State Building because it’s one I know pretty well. It’s 1,453 feet to the top of the lightning rod, but SkyscraperPage.com doesn’t count the needle, so it’s number 13 on their World’s Tallest Buildings. (The tallest is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, built just this year, and — whoa! — it’s about twice as high as the ESB!)
Two International Finance Centre (or Two ifc) in Hong Kong, China, seems to come closest to my comparison height, at 415.8 meters or a little more than 1364 feet. It’s listed as the 10th tallest building in the world. If you go to their website, you can see three different views from the top. I especially love the one of Victoria Peak. It’s breathtaking!
From up there, cars are so tiny that you can barely tell what color they are. People? Practically indistinguishable.
Yet God, far bigger than any skyscraper — bigger than the world, bigger than the universe! — sees me. He sees my heart and mind, as tiny and limited as they are, and loves me just the same. He sees into me and through me.
And we are all called to be like Him, to see as much of the “big picture” as we’re capable of seeing, always striving to see more.