By T.J. Ray

Columnist

 

“Earth is a miracle. Zooming around our sun at 67,000 mph – while our solar system moves throughout our galaxy and the galaxy itself spins across the heavens at supersonic speeds – my coffee cup sits steadily beside my laptop with nary a ripple in the liquid. No turbulence. How does the Almighty God manage this? I am in awe.”

Try as I would, I could not find who originally wrote this, but I certainly like the sentiment and agree fully with it.  Sometimes hunting birds with my camera, I find ample proof of that superpower.

The other day I watched an osprey dive from way up to snag a fish in the reservoir.  Things happened in that capture unbeknownst to me.  The osprey has four “toes” on each foot, one facing forward/the other three facing to the back. Just as he hits the water, the left forward one rotates backward to give him better grip on lunch.  Hitting the water, he also closes his nostrils.

Spring will be here soon, which means hummers will be coming for their nectar.  Watching a hummingbird reveals another little miracle.  If it gets too close to a flower, it reverses its wings and flies backward.  So far as I know, he’s the only bird that can do this.  

That those same little wings are able to carry him across the Gulf of Mexico surely rates as a miracle.

Zoos and flower gardens fascinate me.  To see a blossom that came from a little black seed.  To see a Monarch flutter by that came from an ugly caterpillar.  To watch a newborn giraffe drop fourteen feet from its mother’s body unhurt.  To witness a turtle couple in the act of creating another turtle.  To witness a spider gradually enclose a butterfly in a gossamer web for later feasting. These, dear hearts, are miracles.  

As I’ve grown up and learned a little about our world, my confusion and my wonder have increased.  Remember that book that begins “In the beginning”?  And goes on to tell us all creation took seven days?  Is it really possible that some power could do that?  But then along come scientists with their fossils and tell about a process that took billions and billions of years of work before the first human walked.  

And with them come the stargazers, the astronomers, who point their telescopes and radio beacons at space, and then talk about billions of years.  Did the Big Bang occur 13.7 billion years ago?  And

what was there to go Bang?

And as human brains are wont to do, sometimes somebody will pose a really tough puzzle:  What was before the beginning?  And that’s the moment when we turn to simply observing miracles and revealing that somehow they all came about.  

Words have a pointed way of synthesizing our curiosity and stifling our questions momentarily:   In the words of a favorite poet, Robert Frost:  In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life — it goes on.