In my weekly Works & Wonders column, I combine a brief devotional with other interesting and uplifting bits and pieces I gleaned throughout the week. I hope you enjoy this week’s collection! It includes:
- All Our Thoughts Are Drowned
- 16 Stunning Animals
- Beautiful Bibles
- Hidden Treasure
- Rivers Are Mathematical
- IKEA Complexity
1.
All Our Thoughts Are Drowned
God’s wisdom is not something that he maintains merely within his mind, but something that he displays outside of himself—through creating the world, through sustaining and governing the world, and perhaps most ultimately through achieving redemption for the world. In these rhythmic lines, the great hymn-writer Isaac Watts calls on us to look to what God has made, especially to the night sky with its boundless expanse and glittering stars, and to see there “a deep where all our thoughts are drowned.”
He formed the stars, those heavenly flames,
He counts their numbers, calls their names;
His wisdom’s vast, and knows no bound,
A deep where all our thoughts are drowned.
By studying God’s creation—in its majesty, its intricacy, its creativity—we see that it cannot have come into being by itself, without the hand of a Creator. Rather, it must have been designed by a mind that is vast and wise and established by a power that is unbounded and unlimited. The more we look at creation and study it in awe, the more we must see and know the majestic wisdom of God and the sheer weakness of mankind.
2.
16 Stunning Animals
Every year the Natural History Museum in London hosts the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. This year they received 65,403 entries from 121 countries and territories. While they won’t reveal the winners for another couple of months, they recently released a few especially amazing photos which you can see at Smithsonian. Be sure to enjoy them!
3.
Beautiful Bibles
Schuyler (pronounced sky-ler) is a company that creates beautiful Bibles in a variety of translations. To create Bibles that are beautiful inside and out, it uses high-quality material, skilled craftsmen, and excellent typography. This video tells the story of the business (which was begun by a church planter) and tells what goes into making one of its Bibles.
4.
Hidden Treasure
George Ridgway is a detectorist who searched diligently and found the largest Roman coin collection ever unearthed in Britain—hundreds of them. They date from the reign of Claudius and have been buried for around 2,000 years. How did they get there? Presumably, a long time ago, someone buried his treasure in a field and, for whatever reason, never returned to reclaim it. (Note: A couple of OMGs)
5.
Rivers Are Mathematical
I am woefully poor at both doing and understanding math. However, I still find mathematical facts interesting, even if I can’t fully understand them. Did you know, for example, that virtually every stream on earth has a length proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6? That’s true whether we are talking about the Nile or a creek that trickles through your neighborhood. To me, that sounds an awful lot like something that has been designed, rather than something that just happens to be true. This article at Quanta Magazine asks (and attempts to answer) why rivers are so mathematical. Sadly, but not surprisingly, it admits the existence of no designer.
6.
IKEA Complexity
This is kind of silly but kind of fun, especially for those of us who have built a lot of IKEA furniture through the years. The IKEA Complexity Index ranks more than 20,000 IKEA products by how complex they are to build. In case you just have to know, the most complex product involves 16 assembly manuals, 743 parts, and 236 steps. It takes over 10 hours to finish it up!
