Things Too Wonderful

“Three things are too wonderful for me; four I do not understand…” i

Really? I want to protest. Only four?

I admit I am not the smartest, wisest, nor most educated. I got C’s in biology class, and I avoided higher math. (Lower math almost did me in.) Historical facts dissipate from my brain with the turning of the page, to my history professor husband’s chagrin, and I can’t read music, to my own chagrin.

I have a whole list of things too wonderful for even the smartest, wisest, or most educated, even those with knowledge of all the sciences and higher math and the ability to read musical scores.

How do I know this?

Before I answer, I will give you a few of my “Things Too Wonderful:”

How I can stand upright on this spinning and rotating globe in space. (I tried, as a child, to feel myself spinning and never could.)

How an inanimate, dry and dead-looking seed buried in the soil can result in a daisy or a carrot or a baobab tree. Each one with its own individual, information-packed seed. A daisy seed will not result in a carrot and certainly not a baobab tree.

How a different kind of seed was planted in my body that resulted in another human being coming into the world, an eternal person. (The first time each of my five babies was placed on my chest was, indeed, a thing too wonderful.)

How there is not one type of bird—say, a sparrow—but orders, families, species, and subspecies with ranges of color, shape, size, eggs, bills, wing and claw formation, and with flying, perching, and song variations as well as habitats. I’ve counted at least twenty-five different birds who visit my backyard and perch or swoop or chirp or screech or walk head-first down a tree.

How a wren can build a perfect and durable nest in no more than several brief visits. How the wren pair remembers where they built last year’s nest.

How our atmosphere can produce such a palette of oranges, lavenders, pinks, violets, blues, purples, (hues and tints of each) that we call “sunrise” or “sunset.”

How an arrangement of atoms, cells, corpuscles, veins, bony masses, muscles, tendons, joints, organs, orifices, follicles, tubes, recesses, protrusions, systems, and mechanisms can make up the living, breathing, balancing, walking, talking, seeing and hearing being that is me, with no other person precisely the same in all the multi-billions of people that live or have ever lived. We are each spectacularly individual.

If you’ve been to the Cincinnati zoo, you’ve surely marveled, as I did, at the amazing differences between the blubbery manatee and the graceful, swinging gibbon, and been mesmerized by a look into the lion’s tawny and penetrating eyes. (How about an animal with a pouch? Or one with a tower of a neck?)

This is my short list. These, among many other things, are too wonderful.

I know how science explains these phenomena. But what if even the scientists don’t have a grasp on how it all came about and continues to be? Simply, is?

There is one question that swallows up all questions—and answers. That question was hurled out of a whirlwind by God to a now-humbled Job, who had been “darkening counsel by words without knowledge.” ii

You can almost hear the thunder of God’s voice:

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding!

Well, Job wasn’t there. Neither was I. No one was there in the beginning, except God.

God, too, had a list. Could Job explain, for instance: how the measurements of the earth were determined? How the sea had limits prescribed for it? How the dawn knows its place? How the horse has might and the ostrich, foolishness? How the eagle mounts up and the hawk soars?

God’s list goes on and on for a while. He urged Job to consider his list and argue from his own wisdom. Job’s mouth was shut. He meekly said, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…” Then he wisely invited God to speak and to fill in the gaps of his understanding. He repented his audacity.

We are audacious if we take these things for granted or think we understand them. Or if we simply do not take the time to wonder and to recognize that their Creator is, by

definition, himself a thing too wonderful. He has prepared all these things for our delight.

And He welcomes us to invite him to speak and give us his list. It will take the rest of our lives and all eternity to ponder.

“Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” iii

i See Proverbs 30:18, 19

ii See Job 38:1, 2

iii Psalm 111:2

Photo: Spider silk, magnified 53 times,

from Just Out of Reach, Unseen by the Naked Eye,

Phaidon