Long years ago, when I walked the quaint streets of ancient St. Albans in England or strode the surrounding hillsides, I began to consider the world around me more carefully than I had done aboard aircraft carriers in my navy days.

Life began to be a bit more important than preparing to blow our enemies out of the water or out of their lairs on land, wherever they might be hiding. Military strategizing is still very necessary in this mad, mad world of ours, but after we have finished killing each other, then what?

I had gone back to school and was surrounded by students who had little interest in the military, and I met a delightful fellow student with a smile that could launch a thousand ships (no, her name was not Helen) and could stop me in my tracks at a thousand paces. This began to underline the real importance of life.

Of meadows and miracles

One day after meandering alone beside the nearby river, I climbed a grassy hill to look out over the countryside and then sat down to enjoy the scene. Cows were contentedly grazing on the lush green grass, converting it by means of that special magic of theirs into milk and cream, making possible all the delights of butter and cheese to complement a typical British packed lunch. I snapped off a long blade of grass at its ground-level white knuckle, put the creamy white end in my mouth and joined with the cows in the pleasure of grazing.

This one wonderful blade of grass fascinated me. It was like a long green spearhead, swelling swiftly from the shaft and then thinning off gradually all the way down to its pointed tip. It was a very elegant construction, a work of art surpassing the most delicate piece a skilled craftsman could make. And indeed it was beyond the capability of the most advanced workshop, laboratory or design studio to replicate because it was a living thing—in short, a miracle.

I focused my eyes again on the fields of grass spread out along the river valley and realized that if this solitary blade of grass was a miracle, then I was gazing upon billions of miracles in those fields below.

I bent my head back to look up at the low clouds scudding across the sky like soft bellied tankers full of water, sent inland to irrigate these fields. If only I had a pointed stick long enough, I could prick those soft gray bellies to bring down the rain. Or could I? No. The rain clouds are another miracle over which we men have no control.

A miraculous planet

This whole earth is a miraculous planet perfectly placed in the vast ocean of space, anchored to our wondrous sun, which in its turn sails along its appointed path in the Milky Way. It’s not as if a bunch of rocks were blown out from some inexplicable explosion in space and everything we see came together by dumb chance. Quite the contrary, we see that everything responds to measurable laws—without which, we would have no science.

More marvelous yet, the earth is filled with life of every imaginable kind, and the more we are able to study it, the more astonishing it becomes.

What is life? We simply do not know, because all our wonderful science cannot unravel the mystery, cannot explain that single blade of grass. A fellow member in God’s Church some years ago wrote his doctoral thesis on the intricate work of microbes in the soil that fix nitrogen to the roots of plants—a very complex business, to say the least.

The wonder of you

Dear reader, have you yet realized that you are, in and of yourself, akin to an individual universe composed of trillions of interactive cells, and that each one of those cells is a microscopic city of immense complexity? And have you realized that we human beings coexist in a “global village” that was designed as a symbiotic whole, made purposefully for humanity? Yet, as King David asked in Psalm 8:4, what is man that God should be mindful of him?

It is difficult to persuade atheists that the precise settings of the universe that allow for life are designed, but a growing number of scientists have abandoned former agnosticism in the face of mounting evidence of the profound governance of time, space and matter, let alone the truly mystifying questions of origin.

There will always be those who refuse to acknowledge God’s creation, but let us get out and smell the roses, appreciate the cows and pluck an occasional blade of grass. We need to take time to seriously contemplate the sheer wonder of it all. All nature is designed to support us human beings, but we are as yet only a work in progress. We must move on to perfection if we are ever going to dwell in the new heavens and new earth, which our Father in heaven planned long ago.

And oh yes, that beautiful woman I mentioned became my wife, and we learned together what family means and what our Father means by family. This involves all of us in the ultimate miracle, the first sensational part of which will be accomplished at our Lord’s return. Send for or download our free booklet Transforming Your Life: The Process of Conversion if you wish to learn more.