I was reading that the nearest star is four light years away but if somebody in a spaceship travelled there at 25,000 miles per hour faster than any human has travelled before, it would take him 100,000 years. Yet this distance is dwarfed by the fact that our own galaxy could be 100,000 light years across. Somehow I felt this knowledge depressing for my religious hopes. How could God, the creator of this vastness, have been the same Jesus Christ Who was an itinerant preacher and faith healer two-thousand years ago?

Then I realised that faith and religious conviction have nothing to do with material distance or time. Justice, faith, love are entirely the same 100,00 light years away at the other end of the Milky Way as they are here.

As I lay awake I found this truth comforting. I feel my faith coming into port with the same relief as I take my small boat from choppy seas into Portsmouth Harbour and I could pray in peace.