All Creature Great and Small
“Quick – get a net! Where’s the killing jar? Hurry!!!”
We’re in the mad 4-H project season, where my children are crazily trying to finish more than 20 projects ranging from rocketry and electric to sewing and food preservation. The dining room serves as Project Central, with various posters and partially completed projects spread all over the table, overflowing the boxes that are supposed to contain them. Among other things, Peter and Amada are creating insect collections for entomology. Butterflies and moths, dragonflies and damselflies, beetles and stinkbugs, grasshoppers and crickets, pinned and spread, line the sideboard, awaiting placement in their newly finished insect boxes.
It’s curious how our perception of insects has changed throughout this project. Now when someone screams that there is a bug in the house, rather than telling him to squash it, the first thing out of my mouth tends to be, “Is it interesting?” We’ve found some pretty cool things even inside, like a leaf-footed bug with orange-tipped antennae in the little girls’ bedroom. If we weren’t studying insects or making the collections, this little creature would just have been smashed and forthwith removed. Alright, we still killed him (in the killing jar), but not without marveling at the amazing beauty in this little thing.
One of the reasons I love to weave nature study into our lives is that it forces us to stop long enough to enjoy the beauty God has made and to stand amazed at His incredible visible works that reveal His invisible attributes. How much I miss every day by not just taking the time to look around me and praise Him for His power displayed throughout creation.
Romans1:20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.
We’re in the mad 4-H project season, where my children are crazily trying to finish more than 20 projects ranging from rocketry and electric to sewing and food preservation. The dining room serves as Project Central, with various posters and partially completed projects spread all over the table, overflowing the boxes that are supposed to contain them. Among other things, Peter and Amada are creating insect collections for entomology. Butterflies and moths, dragonflies and damselflies, beetles and stinkbugs, grasshoppers and crickets, pinned and spread, line the sideboard, awaiting placement in their newly finished insect boxes.
It’s curious how our perception of insects has changed throughout this project. Now when someone screams that there is a bug in the house, rather than telling him to squash it, the first thing out of my mouth tends to be, “Is it interesting?” We’ve found some pretty cool things even inside, like a leaf-footed bug with orange-tipped antennae in the little girls’ bedroom. If we weren’t studying insects or making the collections, this little creature would just have been smashed and forthwith removed. Alright, we still killed him (in the killing jar), but not without marveling at the amazing beauty in this little thing.
One of the reasons I love to weave nature study into our lives is that it forces us to stop long enough to enjoy the beauty God has made and to stand amazed at His incredible visible works that reveal His invisible attributes. How much I miss every day by not just taking the time to look around me and praise Him for His power displayed throughout creation.
Romans1:20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.
Comments
Of course if Bethie knew it was going in a killing jar I am not sure she would have handed it over. Aaron's collection consisted of drawings as he could not bear to destroy what God had created. Josh on the other hand still has boxes of what he found and happily plopped in the jars so he could preserve them.
Different approaches.
Hope you all survive the insanity.
Andrew and Kara made large collections in junior high school for life science one year, but they didn't put them in genuine glass covered boxes and something (mice? other insects?) ate them off their boards later.