Here is what you are missing. According to Greene, mentioned above, the radius of the universe is 25 billion times bigger than the Hubble radius. The Hubble radius is as far as the Hubble telescope can see, which is nearly all the universe that can ever be seen since the rest of it is leaving us faster than the speed of light. That is, we can see a grain of sand and take that for the entire earth--similar relative scale.
It can be so red shifted as to be very hard to observe.