How Many Are Your Works, Lord!
Mary Oliver says in her poem, “Good Morning”,
The multiplicity of forms! The hummingbird,
the fox, the raven, the sparrow hawk, the
otter, the dragonfly, the water lily! And
on and on. It must be a great disappointment
to God if we are not dazzled at least ten
times a day.
I truly am dazzled and amazed by our amazing world, a world fashioned and brought into life by our Creator. While it is true that there are many spectacular creatures easily seen and observed, my true wonder comes from the small creatures that all of us often miss, from insects to spiders and down to even bacteria. Often we don’t think about things like bacteria and other such tiny organisms because we can’t see them without aids and we were all brought up thinking that the only good bacteria was a good bacteria. Now we are finding that is not true at all. Bacteria are crucial to all life, including our own. We are discovering that we literally have ecosystems of microorganisms on and in our bodies that keep us healthy and this is true throughout the God’s creation. It is pretty amazing to consider the interconnection of everything. God did not create a bunch of isolated creatures, but He developed entire ecosystems, a world of connections that were obviously important to Him (or he would not have created them) and to all living organisms.
Insects and spiders are a little easier to see, though we often don’t really see them as the remarkable, dazzling examples of God’s infinite wisdom that they truly represent. For example, spiders build structures that rival anything that human engineers do and without the benefit of an advanced degree (except what God bestows on them)!
Understanding the immense diversity of insects and how they fill in all the gaps of an ecosystem is at present beyond human understanding.
How many are your works, O Lord!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
Psalm 104:24
– Rob