“The wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars,” stated NASA chief Charles Bolden when the nuclear-powered rover landed this week.

Described as the size of a small car, Curiosity carries scientific tools, cameras and a weather station. News reports say it has a “robotic arm with a power drill, a laser that can zap distant rocks, a chemistry lab to sniff for the chemical building blocks of life and a detector to measure dangerous radiation on the surface.”

Soon after landing in a crater on Mars, Curiosity began sending black and white photos of the Red Planet and is now sending the first color pictures. Images sent from Mars, like the stars I see in the night sky, remind me of a verse that says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1).

Curiosity is NASA’s seventh landing on our neighboring planet. Other missions include Viking 1 and 2 followed by Pathfinder, Opportunity and Spirit. The fact that scientists on earth can explore another planet in our solar system seems nothing short of a miracle of ingenuity and technology. One NASA scientist has said, “I’m in awe when I look at Mars and know we are there.”

The dictionary defines a miracle as an extraordinary or remarkable occurrence or development, especially one supernatural. The word miracle comes from a Latin word, mirus, meaning wonderful.

Though man has accomplished great things in outer space, I am in awe of the God who created this universe. Right now, though we have no sensation of motion, Planet Earth is spinning at approximately 1,000 mph and traveling through space at about 67,000 mph. Before the day is over, we will have traveled 1.6 million miles of our annual trek around the sun.

Albert Einstein once commented, “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

It’s easy to take for granted that the earth stays in its orbit, or to miss the beauty of the sunrise and sunset each day. John Donne said, “There is nothing that God hath established in the constant course of Nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a miracle…if it were done but once.”

I am also in awe that God would come down from heaven to live and walk among us. Watching the pictures from Mars once again reminded me of the words of Astronaut Jim Irwin. On a photo of himself standing on the lunar surface, he wrote this thoughtful statement, “Jesus walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon.”

But most importantly, I am in awe that God’s son would come and live in a person’s heart. Through faith in Jesus Christ, you and I can know the miracle of forgiveness that makes us a new creation.

Perhaps songwriter John Peterson said it best, “It took a miracle to put the stars in place;

it took a miracle to hang the world in space. But when He saved my soul, Cleansed and made me whole, it took a miracle of love and grace.”