Dedicated to the proposition that the beauty, intricacy and diversity of the world around us speak of a creator who is all-powerful, wise and caring -- a creator who wants to be known by us.
O Lord, what a variety of things you have made!
In wisdom you have made them all.
The earth is full of your creatures.
Here is the ocean, vast and wide,
teeming with life of every kind,
both large and small.
Psalm 104:24-25
I spent a day this week with my two youngest sons at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, and of course could not help thinking about (and talking about) Psalm 104! 32,600 animals there they tell us (I didn't count) and each one unique and amazing, many of them downright unbelievable. You could obviously spend years in a place like that and never soak it all in -- you'd just barely be scratching under the surface (puns intended -- sorry). Moving through the place with my sons (10 and 12) I didn't learn as much as I'd have liked (or move as fast as they would have liked) but I was able to marvel at the creativity and wisdom of our God. I only had my iPhone with me as a camera, but even with my "good" camera, it would have been very hard to begin to do justice to these fantastic and amazing creatures, and their Creator. All I can say is, if you have a good Aquarium near where you live, get out there and prepare to be amazed. God really covered all the bases.
[I was on a mission and in a hurry, on my way to a dry fall pool to look for marbled salamanders. And then on the non-descript grassy path through the woods-- by no means in my mind a destination in and of itself, God arrested my attention and interrupted my agenda. Following is my on-the-spot journal entry.]
There are places in life that demand a slower pace and a deeper appreciation. And these places are far more common than we imagine.
You have brought me to a sacred place to behold your beauty, Lord. And to behold it not on my terms, but Yours. The sudden orange inside the wings of a sunlit comma butterfly can take the breath away.
What is my hurry here? If I must hurry, why even come? It is a time to be alone with One I love. A time to be at peace.
I do love You Lord and I want to love You more. I confess before You the hardness of my heart and the busyness of my life. Let me be still and know that You are God. Be exalted in my life, O Lord. Amen.
Psalm 104 gives great insight into God's delight in His creation, the whole psalm being a celebration of the things He has made. Genesis 1, of course, tells us seven times that "God saw that it was good." This psalm and other passages, however, make it clear that God's delight with His work didn't end abruptly at the end of Genesis 1-- He continues to take pleasure in the things He has made.
I have to go a step further though and say that I am also firmly convinced that God takes pleasure in sharing the things He has made with others who find delight in them and recognize that they are His work. After all, He created us for fellowship with Him and placed us into this world created so magnificently by His hand. Think about His walks in the Garden with Adam and Eve before sin entered the scene. What must those strolls have been like?! The cooper's hawk above represents one of many encounters I have had with God's creation that I have felt especially blessed to share in, and that I am fully persuaded He has specifically orchestrated for the purpose of allowing me to share in His delight and bringing me to a point of praising Him in my life.
May the glory of the LORD continue forever!
The LORD takes pleasure in all he has made.
... more thoughts on Psalm 104
This is the middle phrase of Psalm 104:24. I love the simplicity and depth of this assertion and have come to believe that this is the critical Biblical teaching on creation: that the heavens, the earth, the depths of the seas, and all the creatures contained therein bear witness to God's wisdom and power.
I no longer believe that the validity of my faith or of the Bible as the Word of God hinges on the defense of six twenty-four hour days of creation. Based solely on sound principles of Bible interpretation, I no longer believe that Genesis 1 was intended by God or the human author to be understood as a historical narrative. I have written at length explaining this perspective in "Second Thoughts on Six Days" and I invite you to follow that link to prayerfully consider and comment on what I have shared there. Here I will simply take my stand with the Psalmist in affirming, "In wisdom you have made them all."
O LORD, what a variety of things you have made!
In wisdom you have made them all.
The earth is full of your creatures.
... more thoughts on Psalm 104
Estimates of the total number of species on earth range from five to thirty million, of which only approximately two million have been formally described (see How Many Species are There?). Incredible! But I'd like to bring the discussion down a little closer to home-- something I can wrap my head around.
Yes, I'm stuck on salamanders. My home state of Illinois has twenty species of salamanders. I've been out looking for them and reading up on them a bit recently1 and there's some amazing variety just among the salamanders of Illinois. For example, the salamander pictured above is a redback salamander, but you don't have to be a very astute observer to note that it doesn't have a red back. That's because up to 35% of redback salamanders (and up to 97% in one Illinois county!) lack their red stripe (here's one with the stripe).
But the fun is just beginning. We all know that salamanders are amphibians, like frogs and toads, and that their eggs are laid in water, hatch into tadpole-like "larvae" and later metamorphose into adults, right? Well, yes and no. Redback salamanders along with a few others (the northern slimy salamander is another Illinois salamander with this characteristic) are completely terrestrial. Their eggs are laid on land and their young completely bypass the aquatic tadpole stage. On the other end of the spectrum, hellbenders, mudpuppies and lesser sirens are three Illinois species that are completely aquatic, spending their entire lives in the water breathing through gills. Then just to be different, the eastern newt has a three-part life cycle starting life in the water as most salamanders do, entering a terrestrial lifestyle for a couple of years, and then returning to the water to live out their adult lives.
In my previous post I described an enchanting visit to a temporary woodland pool full of spotted salamanders. Several Illinois species take advantage of these temporary pools for early spring breeding-- the major advantage being that temporary pools have no fish to eat eggs or larvae. However, one Illinois species has a completely different approach. The marbled salamander comes to dry pools in the fall to lay their eggs. The eggs are strategically positioned far enough up the side of the dry pool so that if the water reaches them and causes them to hatch, there is sufficient water there to last until the larvae metamorphose into adults. They actually grow and mature throughout the winter months.
Finally, for something completely different, there is in Illinois, albeit at only one location, a salamander species that is all female. The silvery salamander is one of several salamander species that are essentially all female clones of one another...
O LORD, what a variety of things you have made!
In wisdom you have made them all.
The earth is full of your creatures.
Psalm 104:24
1My main source for reading about the reptiles and amphibians of Illinois, and the source of most of the facts in this post is the Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Illinois. I have also been enjoying very much Swampwalker's Journal: A Wetlands Year and highly recommend it. This is where my information about the marbled salamander comes from.
Psalm 104 is a wonderful Psalm of praise to God focused on the beauty and wonder of His creation. I've had in mind a while to write a series of posts based on Psalm 104, not necessarily "in order." Verse 24 is one of my favorite verses of the Psalm:
O LORD, what a variety of things you have made!
In wisdom you have made them all.
The earth is full of your creatures.
I'll write more about this verse, but for now the final phrase stands out. A couple of nights ago I headed out with a friend into the woods after dark in intermittent early spring showers. We came to a site he knew of-- a couple of days before only a damp depression in the forest floor, but now a shallow pool of rainwater. From afar we could hear the high pitched calls of the Spring Peepers; as we approached, the lower-pitched "chattering" sound of a large chorus of wood frogs. As we stood and swept our flashlights over the water, dozens and dozens of spotted salamanders became visible (photo-- along with a wood frog). And still again as we began searching along the perimeter of the pool, a good number of silvery salamanders. All four of these amphibian species are normally not animals you'd be likely to see, but here they all were in large numbers in a yearly event repeated in temporary woodland pools across N. America. Whether or not we're there to observe them, there they are. Turn a log over, look under a stone-- places we never see teem with fascinating creatures we could never imagine. The earth is full of His creatures.
For more about temporary woodland pools and spring amphibians, see this Environmental Almanac post on the topic.
Ah Lord God forgive us. You gave us all we could ever need in Your creation, and yet we wanted more. Not enough to be created in Your image, to know You and walk with You; we wanted to BE You. "You will be like God" Satan had said. A lie: we WERE like You but traded that instead to be like him-- children of rebellion rather than children of God.
You sent Your Son to re-open that door, but we hardened our hearts against You. We crucified Your Son-- and in so doing fulfilled Your plan. You raised Him from the dead and opened the door. Where once there was only death, now there is Life.
I sit in a park surrounded by trees-- huge, beautiful trees three times my age, splendid, magnificent trees-- a glimpse of the garden You made for us, and made us for. It's stately-- it speaks of You and inspires quiet awe. The longer I linger the more I see, the more I hear. Your presence is unmistakable. Oh why were we not satisfied!?
O Lord, I do not know how You flung the stars into space, Or the time You took to carve the canyon we call "Grand," But this I know: whether in a moment or spanning millions or billions of years, You designed and crafted these, and all of life, to be to the praise of Your majesty. Amen.
*occasioned by a rethinking of some of my previously held dogmas
I have become a connoisseur of sound. Nature sounds to be precise. I'm a visual person, enamored of images and deeply enjoying opportunties to practice nature photography. But in the process of completing the volunteer hours required for my Master Naturalist certification, I have been working with the county forest preserve district doing frog call surveys. These are done after sunset and I find myself spending hours alone after dark in the county forest preserves. There's not a lot to see (though when the moon is nearly full there is a beauty unique to its pale light) but there is plenty to listen to-- sometimes a rich tapestry of sound; sometimes vast stillness with only brief interruptions of sound; sometimes subtle sounds emanating from the darkness. There's the crescendoing chorus of spring peepers or cricket frogs building in intensity and volume only to taper off again for an interlude of silence before starting all over. There's the sharp slap of a beaver's tale on the water warning of my intrusion into their world of night. There's the nearby chattering of two raccoons apparently in some disagreement, the distant hooting of a great horned owl, the snorting and stamping of a herd of deer in the meadow as startling to me as I am to them. As the weather gets warmer the insects increasingly become a part of the symphony of night. They're only getting started now with the whirring of some nearby crickets, the fluttering of a moth when my flashlight is on, the buzzing of a mosquito.
At a time I'm normally home sleeping, there's an awful lot going on in the woods and on the water. Some of the sound is incidental -- the startled deer, the angry raccoons and the buzzing mosquito (indeed, it would be to the mosquito's advantage to approach me more silently!), but much of it is purposeful, in particular, the calling of the frogs. Using sound to attract a mate makes a lot of sense when the attracting is to be done at night (some species will call in the daylight hours as well as after dark, spring peepers and cricket frogs among them, but after sunset is definitely prime time). I marvel at the diversity of the frog and toad calls-- a much greater variety than the stereotyped cartoon-style "ribbit". And I am impressed by how well and how far most of the calls carry, over the water especially, but also across land. In my surveys I have frequently discovered temporary bodies of water I didn't know existed by following the calls of one or more frogs or toads. It's a system of finding a mate beautifully designed for life after dark at the water's edge and just one more small detail attesting to the brilliance and creativity of the Master Designer. "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!" (Psalm 150:6) Amen I say to that.
My experiences in the woods at night have given me a whole new appreciation for the richness of our audio environment. Please enjoy this sampling of "sound bites" from my wandering in the woods (or hop over to my Frog Blog and Podcast).
Sample Sound Bites:
the rise and fall of a chorus of spring peepers
a couple of western chorus frogs
intro by crickets, feautred solo by eastern gray tree frog, percussion by cricket frogs, incidental sounds by geese on the lake, a bird in the woods and distant American toads
