Friday Freelance: FINGERPRINTS

"There are two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle."
~ Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Last week I volunteered to drive for church group outing. I cleared the kid junk out of our family's 11-passenger van and it looked otherwise pretty clean—until an adult sat in the same spot usually occupied by my ten-year-old son. I suddenly noticed that fingerprints covered the window. We're talking write-in-the-fog-then-wipe-it-around leftovers.

I look over my right shoulder through that window all the time and never notice the fingerprints that have probably been there since before Christmas. That smear is as invisible to me as the kid noise circulating through our house like forced-air heat and the obstacle course clutter which has defined our decor since our fifteen-year-old was born.

How interesting that "adults on board" illuminates fingerprints, pillow talk amplifies kid murmurs, and guests render benign toys and laundry baskets impolite.

The evidence of five kids so thoroughly pervades my house that I take no note of it. Likewise, evidence of God's presence so thoroughly pervades our world that people fail to see it. His fingerprints nonetheless mark every part of our lives, invisible until we look at them rather than through them.

The magnificent grandeur and minute intricacy of creation only begin to testify to His presence. The universe by its size alone defies the evolutionary theory that it sprang forth unaided from a big bang. Its complex beauty evidences an Artist extraordinaire. Its order and seasons and symmetry are inextricably connected beyond the most sophisticated computer's capability.

The autonomy of life still astounds me. How are plants programmed to react to temperature and light, and distinguish which nutrients to draw from the soil? What tells animals how to survive and reproduce and raise young? Watching life emerge from my body (times five) only sharpens the impossibility that a microscopic seed grows into a human, who takes in invisible air and food made of dirt, who functions with rational thought and raw emotion, who survives the world's bitter adversities and climate—who is granted relationship with the Creator.

This relationship is the pinnacle of awe-filling testimony to God's presence. In a world filled with sin and pain and suffering and utter hopelessness, our God seems to take exceptional pleasure in taking what is most hideous and hateful and transforming it. Tragedy is made triumph. What is most devoid of potential becomes precious. From death, everywhere, springs life.

God uses all things for good. If we perceive a situation as a tomb's frigid chamber filled with fog, God uses the fog to draw a fleeting picture with His finger upon the window to something better, leaving behind His invisible yet unmistakable fingerprints.

If we fail to see God's fingerprints, it's because we don't look.

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