Dogs were howling, crickets chirping and birds were tweeting — and nobody else’s tweets mattered. The sky grew dark at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. It was weird and wonderful, all rolled into one.
The sun and moon aligned so that the moon’s shadow passed over the earth and those in the path of the shadow saw a solar eclipse.
We came, we saw and God conquered.
RELATED: Check out other stories on eclipse here.
There’s no other way to reasonably explain the mysterious solar happening on Monday other than our Creator. The complex physics and math at play work no other way.
My wife, daughter, her husband and their two children were in my entourage in Trenton, Ohio — about an hour from our homes in northern Kentucky — to witness the breathtaking moment of a total solar eclipse. I say moment because it lasted a moment — about two minutes and 30 seconds to be exact — when the skies went dark, and you could look up again without the goofy (but protective) glasses and witness the spectacular corona.
But even the anticipation of the totality was an experience with the countdown starting not two minutes before the darkness hit but about two hours when the moon started casting its shadow over the sun. We looked up in our paper sunglasses and watched with wonder in the front yard of our rented home. The rest of the neighborhood didn’t seem to care, or notice, what was happening.
God’s handiwork
Astronomers say there are nearly 300 moons in our solar system yet the one nearest to us is the perfect size and distance to match the sun even though the sun is 390 times larger than the moon and 390 times farther away.
If the moon was smaller, the sky would not have turned dark and if it was larger, the corona would never be seen. Instead, it is just the right size and distance.
Could all that be coincidence? I’m not buying it. Call it God’s handiwork.
It was perfect, like always and that’s so God.
An eclipse happens somewhere on the planet every 18 months or so, but it wasn’t going to be happening in the U.S. for another 20 years. That’s why my wife and I decided to go and experience it for ourselves in a town we have never visited. The next time around, we would be 86. Not to be morbid, but this was perhaps the last chance.
My daughter and wife are, for lack of a nicer name, science geeks. Of course, that made our experience even more fun. They had done their homework with lots of facts and figures, and my wife really did hers. She prayed for clear skies since they invited us to tag along. Clouds were in the forecast. She told me on Sunday that she changed the prayer not for clear skies but thanking God for the clear skies to come. Guess what? Clear skies came.
Never underestimate the power of prayer. I know she doesn’t.
It was hard not to marvel at the Creator’s magnificence. The beauty reflects the character and glory of God. If you have seen an eclipse in its totality, with the beads of light and the diamond ring around it, most people call it the best natural phenomenon they have ever witnessed.
It speaks a universal language of beauty and wonder that clearly brings to mind the Creator who spun the stars and planets into orbit in the first place.
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” – Psalm 19:1.
EDITOR’ NOTE — This story was written by Mark Maynard and originally published by Kentucky Today.
