Our
family went to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago yesterday and saw the feature Cosmic Collisions. Unlike many
planetarium shows, Cosmic Collisions is
not a soothing lay-back-and-gaze-at-the-night-sky kind of experience. Instead, Cosmic Collisions grabs visitors and
hurls them through time and space to explore the hypersonic impacts that drive
the continuing evolution of the Universe. To borrow from the show’s promotional
booklet, “This new
space show focuses on the full range of collisions, from catastrophic planetary
impacts and the merging of massive galaxies to the continual explosions
occurring in the center of the Sun and the incessant barrage of small ionized
particles in the solar wind ricocheting off Earth’s magnetic field.”
In
other words, it was a show with lots of light, noise and power. I knew my boys
would love it; I was less sure of the little girls. What I didn’t expect was
the show’s effect on me. The colliding planets, smashing stars and entire
galaxies swirling into each other all reminded me of foster care.
While
sitting in my extremely comfortable reclining chair pondering this connection,
I did at the same time feel a bit of alarm that I could watch a show whose
reach included trillions of stars, billions of years—indeed the enormity of the
universe and existence itself—and yet somehow make an analogy so it was all
about me. But I put this concern aside because there was nothing I could do
about it and I also had to keep an eye on five-year-old Jamie who was
whimpering next to me each time a collision seemed imminent.
“Look!
Fireworks!” I whispered in a fake, happy voice as an asteroid seven miles wide
crashed into earth sixty-five million years ago.
In
our nearly six years of being foster parents, collision has been a theme for
Bill, me, and our foster children. Our current foster daughter, T, has been
back and forth between our home and that of her biological father three times.
Every time T has been detained from the custody of her parents and brought to
our house, two worlds have collided. When abuse, neglect and dysfunction meet
with stability and purpose, the meeting point is necessarily a crash because
the two ways of living are traveling in opposite directions.
Yet
the theme of Cosmic Collisions was
that every crash, despite the initial destruction, eventually brings about
something new. When a Mars-sized body collided with a young Earth four and a
half billion years ago, the resulting debris formed our moon. That seven-mile
asteroid Jamie was (rightfully) afraid of heated our earth to 500 degrees for
an entire hour. This, scientists theorize, caused the extinction of most life,
including the dinosaurs, but it also allowed for the remaining life to evolve
into today’s world.
When you’re in the middle of the crash, it’s
hard to believe that something good and new is forming. The debris of foster
care orbits our family-- endless court appearances; visits from social workers;
upsetting behaviors by Teenasia; strained relationships with the biological parents.
Yet, yesterday’s show taught me that collision is the way of the Universe. And
because I believe God authored the Universe, I must also believe that collision
is of God.
God
is not afraid of crashes—witness the spectacular collision between Jesus and
religious authorities and the change it eventually ushered in.
To be
a part of God’s Universe then, is to see the collisions in our lives not as
travesties we should have been able to swerve around, but rather as the
inevitabilities of belonging to a universe that requires collision in order to
expand. We are called to both collide and to become new because of our
collisions.
As Teenasia nears her one-year anniversary this third time around, it was a collision late
in the show that gave me the most hope. On the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, I
watched as two small stars began moving closer and closer together. Complicated gravitational forces were
bringing them toward each other and suddenly the two separate stars touched.
The new, rejuvenated star shone so brightly, I could hardly believe it was only
a combination of two stars—so different and beautiful did it appear in the
night sky. Different and beautiful. Both stars had changed for the better
because of the collision.
And I
couldn’t even see the debris.
