[Editor's Note: The following is adapted from the introduction of James Sire's book The Universe Next Door, Fifth Edition. Copyright(c) 2009. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press PO Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515. http://www.ivpress.com/.]

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life:
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
~Matthew Arnold, "The Buried Life"

In the late nineteenth century Stephen Crane captured our plight as we in the early twenty-first century face the universe.

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist."
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
  a sense of obligation."
(From Stephen Crane, War Is Kind and Other Lines (1899), frequently anthologized.)

The Hebrew poem that follows is Psalm 8. How different is Crane's perspective from the words of the ancient psalmist, who looked around himself and up to God and wrote:

O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
above the heavens.
From the lips of children and infants
you have ordained praise
because of your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
What is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You made him ruler over the works of your hands;
you put everything under his feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!