"When I Consider Thy Heavens"
by Arthur Gordon, Guideposts Contributing Editor

I once knew a very intelligent man who wrestled mightily with the question of faith. He didn't consider himself a believer, but he wanted to be one. So he listened to sermons and he read books and he studied the works of theologians and he brought all his very considerable intellectual powers to bear, but nothing seemed to make any difference. His mind remained dominated by doubts.

Then one day when I met him he seemed different. Quieter. Happier. Calmer. The change was so apparent that I asked him what brought it about.

He said, "You won't believe how simple it was."

"Yes, I will," I assured him. The causes behind great changes are often very simple.

He told me he had been spending some time with his mother. One day during the visit he fell into conversation with her gardener, an elderly man named Ambrose, whose face, he said, radiated a remarkable serenity and benevolence . . . "as if he were in love with life and everything in it." When, half joking, my friend asked Ambrose what made him so happy, the old man said that things were always happening that made him happy. The most recent was the recovery of his daughter from an illness that had been pronounced terminal. Indeed, the doctors at the hospital had warned her father that she only had a few hours to live.

The old gardener told my friend that he went home and opened his Bible and read how Hezekiah, the king of Israel, had asked the Lord to spare him when he was on his deathbed. And how the Lord saw his tears and answered his prayer and granted him 15 more years of life. Ambrose said he got down on his knees with the Bible open on the bed in front of him, and he begged the Lord with tears to grant his daughter 15 years of life, or even more. And from that moment his child began to make a recovery that left the doctors baffled and amazed. 'You see," the old gardener said, "I know prayer works because I believe in God."

"And why do you believe so firmly in God?" my doubting friend asked him.

The old man looked surprised. "Why," he said, "when I gaze up in the sky and see the sun and the moon and the stars, I know Somebody had to put them up there. That's why I believe in God. Who else could have done it?"

"You know," my friend said to me, "all the books I'd read, all the studying I'd done, left me untouched. Unchanged. But somehow that simple phrase 'Who else could have done it?' seemed to reach down deep inside me. And something in me, something very quiet, something very profound, was ready at last to accept that old man's answer. Only God could have done it.

"Wasn't it the Psalmist who said, 'When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained . . .'" (Psalm 8:3).

He stopped speaking, and I could see that he was deeply moved. Finally he said, "I don't have any doubts anymore, but perhaps I have a word for those who do. Stop wrestling with all those tremendous unanswerables. Just go outside and look up into the night sky and ask yourself who or what could have created such mystery and majesty. Then listen—and perhaps the same answer will come to you that came to me: Only God could have done it.

"When you offer that answer to yourself, and really accept it, your doubts will fade away."