Another Look at Horton Hears a Who

I didn't particularly care for this movie, especially because the kids trashed my theater and took years off the usefulness of my poor aching feet. However, there is a sort of spiritual side to the movie that deserves another look.

Here is the synopsis of the movie: "An imaginative elephant named Horton hears a faint cry for help coming from a tiny speck of dust floating through the air. Although Horton doesn’t know it yet, that speck houses an entire city named Who-ville, inhabited by the microscopic Whos, led by the Mayor. Despite being ridiculed and threatened by his neighbors, who think he has lost his mind, Horton is determined to save the particle--because “a person’s a person, no matter how small.” Horton’s eight-word explanation for his actions embodies an idea both simple and profound, and which means so much, to so many. Horton explains to his skeptical friends: “If you were way out in space, and you looked down at where we live, we would look like a speck.” Then there’s Horton’s code--his motto--that, “an elephant’s faithful 100 percent”--pointing to his honesty and determination to never abandon his mission to find a new home for the speck that houses the incredible world of Who-ville." (taken from Hollywood.com)

Imagine if the Earth were that speck of dust, trapped inside a solar system which is a tiny part of a galaxy of stars, one of hundreds of billions of stars in the cosmos. That is our reality. We live on a beautiful blue marble, the only inhabited rock in our solar system. We're not the center of Creation. We're not even the center of our solar system. If we were able to look at the Milky Way, the Earth would be a tiny speck in one of the outer bands of the swirling mass. Scientists tell us that the universe - the millions of galaxies in the entire cosmos is 10 billion lightyears in radius. But even then this is only an estimation based on how long it takes for the light to reach us from the oldest known stars. To give you a perspective of how tiny we are in the universe we live in, it would take 980,000 earths to fit inside our sun. The light from our sun only takes 8 minutes to reach us. The Earth is 93 million miles from the sun. If we were going to drive to the sun, we'd have to drive at 93 miles per hour for one million hours (about 115 years factoring in bathroom breaks). Now imagine our solar system about 80% away from the center of our galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter and about 1,000 light years thick. There are about 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone. This gives you a perspective as to how similar the Earth is to Who-ville!

We're really impressed with the vastness and the beauty of Creation. In fact, man devotes a lot of research and money at understanding our place in the cosmos. But most of us spend our time looking down at the earth beneath our feet. We're focussed on our own dreams and challenges. We worry about our future and expend most of our energy attempting to control our own little portion of our world.

I'm not trying to make you think we're small. We are small. We are but a mote of dust in all of God's Creation. The thing is, we matter to Him. But unlike Horton who can only hear the cries of help from the citizens of Who-ville, God is with us. The star-breathing God who created everything that is, took the time to knit each and every one of us so that no two of us are exactly alike. He talks to us, if we will listen. He shows us how much He loves us in the beauty of nature. He will even live inside us if we ask Him. But most of the time we're only interested in His helping hand to get us out of our messes.

Only by viewing ourselves in the vastness of Creation can we truly understand our need for someone who's big enough to handle things that are beyond our control. Thank God there is a God we can depend on 100% of the time, who is willing to go to extraordinary lengths on our behalf. We should all be as appreciative of God as the citizens of Who-ville were of Horton once they learned there was someone bigger than they were.