Photo and Commentary ©2023 by Maylan Schurch
Sabbath, August 19, 2023
Right around a month ago, Shelley and I were walking on a familiar trail near the Lake Youngs Reservoir, which is near our neighborhood in South Renton. As you can see in the background of the photo above, it’s a pleasant trail. On one side are fences into peoples’ backyards, and on the other side is a six-foot woven-wire fence separating the trail from one of Seattle’s largest water sources.
As I walked along, I spotted something on the trail which looked interesting. It was a 1 inch-square piece of wood, and as I turned it in my fingers, I said to myself, “This was cut by a saw.” I don’t know who cut it like this, nor why it finally ended up on the walking trail. It’s certainly not a piece of lawn-bark.
But I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that the shape of this wood-cube did not happen by accident. It’s possible that the side of the cube which faces out toward the viewer may have broken, but the side pressed by my thumb had definitely felt the bite of some kind of saw.
Take another look at this photo’s out-of-focus background. In it, there’s a mix of the natural and the man-made. The fences on the left were definitely sawed. The woven wire on the right was shaped by machinery. Even the white stone/gravel on the trail was crunched into a uniform size by a rock-cruncher.
But the rest of what you see in the photo is vastly more complex than anything humanity has produced. From the sliver of blue sky, to the oxygen-generating tree leaves, down to the humblest weed at the fence’s foot, and the heartening glow of the sun which nourishes it all, not to mention my human hand itself, there is breathtaking evidence of complex design, if people would just open their eyes and consider it.
“The heavens declare the glory of God;” says Psalm 19:1 (NIV), “the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”