Ask

ASK

By Theopoulos

"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you."

Matthew 7:7

An African man was working in a field of numbers in a Space Flight Center. He built equations to try and understand the numbers and make sense of the data. Facts. Truth.

One day he heard a voice say, “Follow me.”

Small and whispered, he had heard the voice before. Since he was a child in fact. It had saved his life. But he did not understand.

On another day he heard that same voice. “Follow me.”

He responded, “I know you, friend. I don’t understand.”

Then one day, years later, he faced a quandary. On the one hand he had the numbers which made sense of his local physical world. But he knew his local frame of reference was not all there was.

Then he heard the voice say again. “Follow me.”

The man responded, “Where?” 

Despondent he dropped to his knees and asked, “Is it you? What's the true nature of your Universe?” Sobbing he let go of any pretense of understanding and waited to accept whatever fate would come.

Still kneeling in front of that open window, with sun light shining on his body the man saw an unimagined image form in his mind. One he had never seen before.

The man saw himself flying between galaxies. Time had no meaning. He rapidly approached a galaxy tilted to one side. As he approached its nucleus like an eagle swooping in at an angle he saw a vast ball of light. Around it a disk of energy that seemed to carry him around its periphery. He whipped around with the bright disk and was carried amoung strands of plasma, streamers, field lines until engulfed in them he was carried high above the galactic core. He headed away from the maelstrum. Back into the space between the stars. Then he awoke from the vision.

Seven days later the man was in a briefing at the Space Center. A great space-based telescope had just taken a picture of a galaxy very far away. As he approached the group of PhDs he heard them exclaim, “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What is it?” they said.

The group parted and the man looked at the picture. Utterly shocked, he now saw a picture of a fat away galaxy, canted at an angle with a jet shooting out of its center.

His legs were wobbly. Quietly he made his way back to his office and closed the door.

He had a large open window. Sun light streamed in from above. He was there a long time. Dropping to his knees he wept. “You are!”

Thirty years later, PhDs are still trying to figure out what that picture was. The man studied quantum gravity, multidimensional physics, String Theories, and a black bound book on his top shelf. Still striving to understand. Truth.

He does not strive alone.

Together, he still asks.

Truth is.

End