Awestruck.  It’s the only word I can come up with to explain my response to the total solar eclipse on April 8.  
I had seen many partial eclipses and full lunar ones but at a little after 3 p.m. in Markle, my eyes filled with tears as I looked into the sky and it darkened all around us. I heard others respond with cheers, clapping and expressions of awe, a special moment indeed. When the first beam of the sun came out after three minutes of darkness the “diamond ring” effect happened! I started singing “How Great Thou Art” in my soul.
David the shepherd, later king, expresses this in Psalm 19, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”
There are at least two full solar eclipses and two full lunar eclipses each year somewhere in the world. The sun is about 400 times larger than the moon and 400 times farther away from the earth than the moon. The universe is so intricate these events have been anticipated through the ages. The next total eclipse in the United States will be 2044. None of this could have happened by chance.
There is a God, my friend, who created this universe! April 8 was a stunning reminder revealing the knowledge of His glory!
Ken Locke is corps administrator of The Salvation Army in Warsaw and director of the Greater Warsaw Ministerial Association. Have ideas for this column? Go to www.gwma.info.