Day 31.

In the years of my later youth I had spent a lot of time in lonely places. My background with a major in biology meant that when I went to those lonely places, I wasn’t just looking at plants, trees, and flowers, birds and creatures. I had become an unwitting witness to the miracles of nature, to the architectural feats, the complex chemical marvels, the innovative aviation and a huge range of sophisticated data processing.

Just the simple process of a plant turning toward the light (in what is known as photo tropism) is an amazingly complex chemical manipulation. I had done an assignment on this years previous. This is the process whereby a plant measures, interprets, moves, and responds to light. Even in a dark room a plant will respond to a single flash of light! The leaves on trees are constantly bending and twisting in this process as they jostle to gain maximum exposure to available light. Even photosynthesis is an amazingly complex process, where the plant or tree takes energy from the sun, combines it with carbon dioxide to produce the oxygen by product we all live from. The chemical complexity of this process boggles the mind.

How is it that everything in nature is recycled without pollution? An average tree will elevate hundreds of liters of water everyday without electricity or pumps. Trees and plants mastered the art of aviation, millenniums before man even thought of it, producing tiny parachutes, helicopters and gliders that will travel hundreds of metres or even hundreds of kilometres, as in the thistle.

If I looked up at night I had learnt that the location of our solar system within the galaxy is absolutely perfect? We are protected from lethal levels of radiation and far enough from the core that we can discern the type of galaxy in which we live. And yet we are close enough to nearby stars that we can see them with the naked eye and study them closely through the use of telescopic equipment. Furthermore, we are positioned just far enough away from any outside stars that they don’t pose any danger to life or prevent scientific study of the universe beyond. And to bring it home, the unique position, location and features of the Earth within our galaxy offer compelling evidence of a very intentional Creator and a very privileged planet.