Lights in the Night

30 Seconds for Hope: The flashes and flickers of little flying lanterns goaded my curiosity and beckoned me to chase. As I studied each captured firefly in my five-year-old fingers, amazement captured my mind. And over the years, scientific studies confirmed my awe—life must be the invention of a Designer! (See full quote below by Douglas Axe, Ph.D., microbiologist) That brought hope! We have a Creator who knows us and cares about us. You and I are never alone.

And now the full story:

The flashes and flickers of little flying lanterns goaded my curiosity and beckoned me to chase. My  legs romped along the shores of Lytle Lake in pursuit of these flashlights on wings. With each capture, I studied the firefly in my five-year-old fingers, eventually asking my daddy, “What would happen if I put a whole bunch in a jar? Could I light up my room all night?” As a five-year old, I truly wondered it, fascinated by a creature that emitted light. While my fingers had been capturing lightening bugs, amazement was capturing my mind—and I never lost that sense of wonder.

As an eight-year old I sat in a treetop in my backyard and studied mistletoe berries that grew there. And I wondered…

As a ten-year old, on summer evenings my daddy and I would spread a blanket on the grass to gaze at the Milky Way and at the universe beyond. And I wondered…

As a teen I marveled at new leaves that regularly unfurled from the philodendron on my school desk.

As a young wife, my husband and I traipsed to the local library for cheap dates, grabbing reference books filled with colorful pictures of flowers, birds, butterflies, fish—and exchanging whispers of marvel over each colored frame.

And I wondered…

School lessons had told me that it was all accidental, that the complex miracles surrounding me had all happened by chance. Really?  My brain kept saying, “Fat chance,” so I pursued more studies on my own. Studies about the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Studies about the nature of decay. Studies about the probabilities (or rather the improbabilities) of “accidents” being able to organize molecules into living systems. I discovered it was so highly improbable as to be statistically impossible. The instructions that are found in the DNA of living cells, and the systems that are subsequently engineered, are so complex that I could not believe they came about by accident.

And my quest goes on.

Not long ago I came upon a book written by molecular biologist Douglas Axe, Ph.D. – Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed (2017). As a researcher at Cambridge, Dr. Axe spent years researching protein structure in living cells, and what was his conclusion?

And if the ability of cyanobacteria to make sugar from sunlight, air, and water has our eyes popping and jaws dropping, as indeed it should, try to imagine a proportionate response to the fact that they also make cyanobacteria out of those same raw natural ingredients! In fact, they make sugar only as a step toward making everything else—all the strikingly complex molecules that must be knit together into all the astoundingly complex systems and superstructures needed to form a living cyanobacterium.

It boggles the mind.

…What we have deduced to be true of inventions generally—that they cannot happen by accident—is all the more true of the particularly remarkable inventions we see in life…

I can only see these ingenious creeping, climbing, swimming, soaring, blooming, burrowing, luring, lunging, spinning, sporulating, fleeing, and fighting inventions as having come from the mind of God. To me, nothing else makes any sense. (AXE, 2017, pp. 175, 184-5)

Indeed. Nothing else made any sense. And so, through nature I was ushered into the realm of believing a Creator made me, knew me and cared about me. And that was a great encouragement.

We have an anchor for hope – Our Creator is always near.  Psalm 139 NLT

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       Therefore, we who have fled to [God] for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.  Hebrews 6:18b-19a NLT

WORKS CITED

AXE, D. O. (2017). UNDENIABLE: How biology confirms our intuition that life is designed. NEW YORK, NY: HARPERCOLLINS.