Planet Earth

I have to admit it: I’m a nerd. A big nerd. I love to read. (I’m amazingly grateful for the blessing that my Kindle has been in Africa, by the way!) I can kill hours on crossword puzzles and Solitaire. I’m a Food Network junkie, and I’ve been in serious Alton Brown withdrawal since January. I like, really like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. I watched Gandhi a couple of weeks ago, all by myself. I love learning. I want to understand. I need to know.

Somehow, I didn’t watch Planet Earth when it aired on TV a few years ago. I don’t know how I missed it. (Maybe my bottom-of-the-line satellite package didn’t carry the right channel? I’m a nerd, but I’m a cheap nerd!) Anyway, somehow I missed it. I remember seeing clips in commercial and thinking that the shots were amazing, and being jealous that I couldn’t justify showing it to my English classes the way the science teachers did. But I never got around to watching it.

Last week I was snooping through my supervisor’s DVD collection, trying to find something new to watch, and what did I find but Planet Earth! Because, as earlier established, I am a big nerd, I borrowed the entire series. My roommate, who is not as big a nerd as I am, had no desire to join me, so Planet Earth has become my “filler” to have on while I’m cooking, folding laundry, straightening my bedroom, or, in a testament to overwhelming nerd-dom, while playing Spider Solitaire.

Over and over again, I am struck by just how magnificent this world is… and by how intentional the Creator was when He designed it. There are caves deeper than some of the biggest buildings man has made. The ecosystems around the world, even though they’re so vastly different, are perfectly in balance. The tallest mountains in the world, so tall that birds can’t fly over them, are placed in a location where winds passing over them will create the needed rains in Southeast Asia. And our planet itself is positioned at such a place in the universe where we won’t burn up from being too close to the sun, but we won’t freeze because we’re too far away.

How good He is to be so in the details of this world. There are still plants and animals that we don’t even know about; there are places in this world that we’ve just discovered. He made them all, just because He could, and just because He wanted us to enjoy them and understand just how good and great He is. I am in awe of the Creator, because of what He has created!

4 “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you know so much. 

5 Who determined its dimensions and stretched out the surveying line? 6 What supports its foundations, and who laid its cornerstone 

7 as the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? 

8 Who kept the sea inside its boundaries as it burst from the womb, 

9 and as I clothed it with clouds and wrapped it in thick darkness? 

10 For I locked it behind barred gates, limiting its shores. 

11 I said, ‘This far and no farther will you come. Here your proud waves must stop!”…

22 “Have you visited the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of hail? 

23 (I have reserved them as weapons for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war.) 

24 Where is the path to the source of light? Where is the home of the east wind? 

25 “Who created a channel for the torrents of rain? Who laid out a path for the lightning? 

26 Who makes the rain fall on barren land, in a desert where no one lives? 

27 Who sends rain to satisfy the parched ground and make the tender grass spring up? 

28 Does the rain have a father? Who gives birth to the dew? 

29 Who is mother of the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens? 

30 for the water turns to ice as hard as rock, and the surface of the water freezes. 

31 Can you direct the movement of the stars—binding the cluster of the Pleiades or loosening the cords of Orion? 

32 Can you direct the sequence of the seasons or guide the Bear with her cubs across the heavens? 

33 Do you know the laws of the universe? Can you use them to regulate the earth? 

34 Can you shout to the clouds and make it rain? 

35 Can you make lightning appear and cause it to strike as you direct? 

36 Who gives instruction to the heart and instinct to the mind? 

37 Who is wise enough to count all the clouds? Who can tilt the water jars of heaven 

38 when the parched ground is dry and the soil has hardened into clods? 

39 Can you stalk prey for a lioness and satisfy the young lions’ appetites 

40 as they lie in their dens or crouch in the thicket? 

41 Who provides food for the ravens when their young cry out to God and wander about in hunger?

Job 38:4-11, 22-41