For Wilshire Baptist Church
This past fall we didn’t get to make our annual trip to a national park, but as I wrote here in November, we did make it to a pair of state parks in the Texas Hill Country. And in late November, we traveled to Glacier National Park by way of a Smithsonian webinar about the geology of the park. It was interesting, mind boggling, soul stirring and faith fortifying, but maybe not in the way expected.
I went to Glacier with my family 20 years ago and I want to go back when time and circumstances allow. But until then, we decided to log on and learn a little. To be honest, I was hoping for more travelogue than what we got; more pictures of beautiful landscapes and less diagrams of geologic strata. I felt a little overwhelmed like I did in geology class at Baylor when Dr. Robert Font would punctuate his descriptions of plate-tectonic friction with, “Good God Almighty, it was hot!” Still, the Smithsonian geologist was engaging and he kept it light and interesting. He reminded me that there’s still so much to learn.
The talk included lots of mind-blowing facts, but the one little detail that captivated me most was the tiny raindrop craters that dot some of the rocks at Glacier. The geologist explained that it rained on top of layers of soft clay and the droplets made little craters. And then the rain stopped and the warm air came and dried out the clay, and then other debris blew in and buried the clay and compressed it into rock, and then eventually the debris eroded away leaving the hard rock that today is pocked with those tiny craters.
That was during the Proterozoic age, roughly 500 million to a billion years ago. It rained then just as it does today, but there was nobody there at that time to appreciate it. Nobody to stand out on a hot dry day and feel the cool raindrops falling on their face. No farmers finally getting relief from a drought. No kid excited to get out of mowing the lawn so he can stay inside and play video games. There also was nobody there to complain about the rain. No soccer team disappointed by a canceled game, no young couple in love forced indoors from their picnic. There was nobody there, and yet the rain fell and sometimes it flooded and rushed across the land to carve mountains and gouge valleys and shape the world that we know today.
There are some who believe that all that rain so long ago was just part of the swirling cycles of creation and from that same water we came and we’re just the latest in a long line of species to occupy the planet. And there are some who believe that all that rain back then and the creative events that it was part of were a grand design and process, the pinnacle of which is the human race that has been walking the earth for just a few thousand years. And some in that latter group believe that all of that rain and flooding and earth carving was intended for the benefit of those of us living right now and that this time is the best of all times that have ever been.
I’m thankful that I don’t have the answers to debate about any of that, and that neither do you even if you think you do. We may know the how of creation and our existence, but we don’t know the why – not exactly, not completely. Only God knows that for sure, and I have faith that God’s answer for the why of creation is so much better than our answer of why.
That being the case, I think that if we as a species were to spend a little less energy on trying to discover the certitude of why and spent a little more time accepting the mystery, we might find we are more content and are better citizens of a planet that is not here for our individual, personal enjoyment. And we might be better able to trust an unseen God who alone has the power to create craters in rocks with little drops of rain.
From “The Quiet Faith of Man” by Bill Staines:
You can trust the moon to move the mighty ocean
You can trust the sun to shine upon the land
You take the little that you know
And you do the best you can
And you see the rest with the quiet faith of man.