There Are No Stupid Questions?

Give brief intro about you…

[Show Halley’s Pic]

When I was a 12 years old, I got the chance to see Halley’s comet. Some of you in this room may have had the chance to see it back in 1986. Halley’s only occurs every 76 years. I remember that entire trip because we actually had to travel away from town to see it. I grew up in Homestead and we drove 3 hours to the Keys in order to have minimal light, so we could see it. I remember being all excited about it because I had known very few people who were actually going see it. The place we stopped and got the telescope out was crowded with others who wanted to see it. I remember getting up to the telescope and just seeing this very tiny object. But I was still excited and talked about that event for days afterward.

[Start showing star pics]

I have always enjoyed watching the stars. I love to go camping because we are usually far enough from the city to be able see tons of stars in the sky. During a camping trip with my youth group, we sat under the stars at about midnight and just watched and talked about things going on in the lives of our students. There was something serene about just sitting and watching the stars, wondering if anything else might be out there. I enjoy the great artistry that God put into this world for us.

Do you know why we can’t see stars during the daytime? The non-scientific reason is that the sun and everything else, actually blocks out the light the stars are putting out. The brightness of the stars is not enough to see past the brightness of the sun.

Listen to these interesting facts about stars:

1. One of the stars in the Big Dipper, named Mizar, has another star revolving around it. Each of those two stars have another star revolving around it, and Mizar and it’s companion star each have another star revolving around them. So, what looks like one star is actually 6 stars.

2. Stars twinkle because the light we see coming from the stars travels through the atmosphere around the earth and there is turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere.

3. If you were to drive a car at 100 kilometers an hour, 24 hours a day then you could reach the sun in about 3 years.

4. It takes the light from the sun over eight (8) minutes to reach the Earth. That means that if the sun blew up right now, we would have eight more minutes of life before we were affected as well.

5. Some stars are 600,000 times a bright as our sun.

6. The sky (both northern and southern hemispheres) is divided into 88 constellations. A constellation is a grouping of stars usually resembling a mythical figure from Greek or Arabic folklore.

[Show Contact Slide]

One of my favorite movies is Contact... Give brief background of the movie During the movie, Jodie Foster is asks if she believes that there is life out there, she says ’if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space’. Do you believe that? Do you believe that we are the only ones out there and that the rest of the galaxy is a waste of space? Have you ever thought about it? If you never ask the question, you will never know the answer...

I have a friend named Greg Henry who is an astronomer. He spends his life looking at the stars. I used to love going to his house and talking to him about space and stars and finding out what he knows. I asked him that question one day, if he believed that there was life outside of earth and if that is what he was doing with his research. And he told me, nope, just the opposite, he wanted to prove there was no life out there. The world and space around us is not wasted. I believe it is there so that we can marvel at how great our God is. And trust in the fact that if he is able to create such a world as the one we live in and the ones trillions of miles away, he is able to take care of me and my problems.

[Show Graphic] boys, elephant, zoo

Three mischievous boys went to the zoo one day for an outing, since they had been at school all week. They decided to visit the elephant cage, but soon enough, they were picked up by a cop for causing a commotion. The officer hauled them off to security for questioning. The supervisor in charge asked them to give their names and tell what they were doing at the elephant cage.