My sweet girl asks me what kind of bird that is, hopping
down the tree toward the seed feeder. “That’s a white-breasted nuthatch,” I
tell her. “He’s funny, because he always goes head-first, whether he’s going up
or down.” She agrees that he’s funny.
The bird picks at something in the bark, and abruptly flies
off. “Why’s he leaving,” she asks. “He may have found a juicy bug to eat. Or,
he may be taking it back to a nest for his babies. You know, there are new baby
birds every spring.” Sweet Girl looks back outside and thinks about this.
Genesis 2 begins with a statement that the heavens and the Earth
had been “completed,” before giving the reader a modified account of the beginning
of things. But, it’s curious that we generally perceive that means that it’s
done for good. The story is set over the span of a week. Up to now, every week
has ended with the beginning of another, a human cycle, divinely inspired and
repeated over and over within a similarly unbroken arc of natural cycles.
In those weeks among springs, summers, falls, winters, life
and the physical universe go on making things: An endearing but generally
mediocre star fuses some hydrogen and sends light careening toward the Earth.
Autotrophs catch a bit of that light and combine simple elements together into syncopated
organic molecules. A web of herbivores, omnivores, carnivores, and detritivores
duke it out for that stuff. All of the latter acts are mediated by inherently
creative genetic molecules, incrementally improving the sum of these things
along the way.
The Creation is not history. It’s ongoing, everywhere, all
the time. It’s full of living things. It’s full of biogeochemical cycles. It’s
full of people. And, they’re all miracles.
Image source: Texas A&M University
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