2 January

Today's the day when in 2004 the spacecraft Stardust collected cosmic dust from the comet Wild 2. Stardust had been launched in 1999 and travelled nearly 3 billion miles to become the first mission to collect dust samples from space and return them to earth. Later in its mission it also angled itself into a dust stream believed to originate outside the solar system and so also became the first mission to collect interstellar dust.

There must be some laboratories that are having a field day analysing these little samples of dust. It must be truly amazing to handle material that has travelled outside our solar system – even if it is only dust. But then again, how can we say 'only dust?' It doesn't look much but it's what God made us from. Our humble origins are expressed in Genesis chapter 2:

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Without God's breath in us we'd be next to nothing. God's life-giving power is what separates you and me from the dust we tread underfoot everyday. God really has made something special out of us!