There is beauty all around

I had a very rough time at work last night. Of the three and a half lab assistants normally scheduled for a Tuesday night - one was on vacation, one came in 4 1/2 hours late (and could only work 5 hours), and the half lab assistant (she normally works 4 hours) never showed up. I am in the process of training the new tech - but I spent a good portion of the night doing lab assistant work - and put in 2 hours of overtime.

So I grumbled my way down to the car and grumpily started the 45-minute drive home. And then the sun started to come up. The clouds in the sky (hey - this is Washington State, there's always clouds) turned a beautiful deep pink color, which gradually changed to a golden orange hue that made the trees look like they had a fire behind them. It was absolutely gorgeous, and I was reminded of all of the beauty that is constantly around us.

That brought me to the contemplation on the complexities of life - how plants absorb carbon dioxide and produce the oxygen we breath. I looked at the clumps of tall trees with their yellow leaves half fallen off, amid the clusters of the evergreens that Washington is famous for. While keeping my eyes mostly on the road, I observed the stubborn weeds and scraggly bushes growing by the edge of the road - stubbornly pushing their roots down into the soil to get whatever nourishment they can. No pampered greenhouses or fertilizer for these, but they cling to life and exploit every opportunity to grow.

I looked at the large tangles of blackberry bushes hunkered a few feet back from the pavement. They almost seemed to glower as they brooded over the heaps of yellow leaves that had fallen at their feet. And yet, they are a haven to small animals and insects - who find both shelter and food among their prickly branches.

As I got out of the car I looked up at the soft gray clouds totally covering the sky (It's Washington State all right), and I thought about the kind of world there was before Noah and the flood. Those people never did see the sun - the clouds were so thick that they constantly covered the sky and kept out all the harmful rays that shorten lives. I was suddenly struck by how pretty a color gray can be - a very comforting color too.

As I pondered again on the incredible complexities of life and how everything is intertwined and dependent on each other, I found myself marveling at the popular theory that all of this just spontaneously 'evolved'. How can anybody with a grain of sense believe that there was not some sort of guiding hand at work to put together a world so beautiful, so complex, and so varied?