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:
- Nothing Ever Occurs to God
- Reading Maps
- Mysterious Shapes
- The Phone in Your Hand
- An Iceberg Rolls Over
- The Listening Museum
1.
Nothing Ever Occurs to God
“Folly is bound up in the heart of a child,” says Solomon (Proverbs 22:15), and the great task of parenting is to lead children from foolishness into wisdom—to teach them knowledge and to instruct them in how to practically apply it to life. Hence the great cry of Proverbs is “Get wisdom; get insight; do not forget, and do not turn away from the words of my mouth” (Proverbs 4:5). But while we and our children gain knowledge slowly and only with much effort, God never gains and never loses it. While we know some things well and other things poorly, God knows all things with perfection. Nothing ever occurs to God, nothing ever baffles or confuses God, nothing surprises him. There is nothing he needs to clarify, no information he needs to learn, no data he needs to seek. He knows all things equally well, which is to say, perfectly well. And the natural consequence of perfect knowledge and perfect motives is perfect wisdom. As is often the case, Tozer says it best: “Because God knows all things perfectly, He knows no thing better than any other thing, but all things equally well. He never discovers anything. He is never surprised, never amazed. He never wonders about anything nor … does He seek information or ask questions.” It is good to keep that in mind as you worship him today!
2.
Reading Maps
Sometimes I come across an idea and I think “I wish I had thought of it first!” That’s exactly the case with Reading Maps. What is it? A site that shows you fictional and nonfictional journeys on a map. From Huckleberry Finn to Treasure Island to The Hunt for Red October, it’s got it all. Try some of your favorite books and see where they take you.
3.
Mysterious Shapes
So many of this world’s ancient wonders have been hidden from us by the slow march of time. That’s true in the Amazon, where researchers are finding more and more evidence that what is now jungle was once civilization. New technologies are turning up mysterious shapes that are evidence of the Aquiry, whose civilization probably peaked in the early part of the first millennium. “So far, archaeologists have discovered roughly 1,700 geoglyphs in the area, but they suspect the region contains far more—likely between 23,000 and 30,000. Those figures are much higher than earlier estimates, which suggested the entire Amazon rainforest might contain roughly 10,000 earthworks.” Smithsonian has the story and images.
4.
The Phone in Your Hand
It is easy to grow accustomed to the phone in your hand, and therefore good to step back every now and again to remind yourself what an incredible piece of technology it is. That’s the purpose of The Phone in Your Hand. It takes you through your phone, component by component, to show that it is nothing short of a marvel of technology. “You probably pick up your phone 100 times a day, and spend more time looking at it than you do eating. Sometimes both at once. We’ve made 20 billion of them. Enough for two each and billions more forgotten in drawers. Laid end to end, they would wrap around the Earth 73 times. It’s the most sophisticated object you’ve ever held. A miracle of engineering made mundane.” Not surprisingly, this one is best viewed on your phone.
5.
An Iceberg Rolls Over
We probably don’t often think of icebergs as we consider the marvels of God’s world, but we probably should. That’s easy to do when watching this footage from Greenland, which captures one as it collapses and flips over. “At the beginning of the footage, the enormous iceberg towers above the surrounding water. Cracks and structural failures gradually cause large sections of ice to break away and crash into the sea. Each collapse changes the shape and balance of the iceberg, triggering further ice avalanches, clouds of mist and waves spreading across the water.” You can see the strangely haunting sequence of events in this video.
6.
The Listening Museum
I spend a lot of my life listening to the sound of a keyboard. In fact, I’m doing that as I type these words, of course. But not all keyboards sound the same (or, historically, have sounded the same). The Listening Museum has 36 mechanical keyboards and switches, all nicely curated and sound-mapped. I found it satisfying to work my way through them and hear the differences. For what it’s worth, my keyboard currently has two different types of switches on it since I use different switches for my strong fingers (reds) and my weak ones (whites).
