The Christchurch Recording Centre - riroriroriroriro.org/family/talks/all_talks/publish_A.doc · Web viewThey travel on the air, and are detected, chemically, by the insect’s

No. 201

Nature Shows the Way, - the way God, as Creator, cares for His world, with ingenious provision for

living creatures: most of all for man, to whom He is both Father God and Saviour. One of the provisions He

has made is the means by which insects sense the invisible: and by it find their way about.

We're all bathed in a sea of radiation. Some of it we can see: we call it light. But most of it's

invisible -and unfelt. What we see is a very narrow band of light and colour, with short waves, about a ten-

millionth of a millimetre long. And beyond that, on one side, are the mile-long radio waves that we tune in

to with aerials and receivers: and, on the other, the very short ultra-violet

waves that only some insects can see. But, close to visible light, is

the great band of infra- red waves that we know very little about. They're

shed on to the earth night and day, by moon and sun. And they're thought to provide a sort of

invisible sight for insects.

Now, it's well known that

scent molecules attract insects and guide them to their mates. They travel on the air, and are detected,

chemically, by the insect’s antennae. But it's now thought that they may work in another way also: that

both the insect's warm body and the scent molecules themselves may act like tiny radio beacons, giving out

infra-red waves that play an important part in directing insects.

To pick up waves from the air you need an antennae, or aerials. For gathering in the long radio

waves, our own receiving sets have long metal antennae. Insects have antennae also- but much smaller.

Could it be that they gather in the short infra red rays from scent molecules? Covering these insect antennae

are delicate sensors of various sorts - spines and pits. It's thought that they probably act as detectors - like

the tuned circuits in our radio receivers, to pick out the signals the waves carry.

What would insects use these signals for? First for attraction - to lure a male insect to his mate. To

do this, the female moth gives off scent molecules. It's thought that these molecules are made to vibrate by

the flood of infra-red waves that bathe our earth. They then send out their own particular "colour" of infra-

red waves, in a very narrow wave-band. The male can pick them up with the tiny aerials on his antennae,

half a mile away. They tell him that he's on the right scent, and his mate is waiting. From the length of the

wave, he knows how far away she is. Then there are other waves - and other sensors - for navigation. When

a female moth is ready for mating, she sits in one spot, and vibrates her wings. The action of the muscles

heats her body - and it gives off infra-red waves, in a broad band. The fast movement of her wings "chops"

the waves so that they give out a signal, like the blinking lamp of a lighthouse. It's just right for direction

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finding- and so is the tiny circle of directional antennae with which the male moth is thought to monitor it.

To find our way home to God, we have to tune-in to the invisible. We know even less about how

God speaks to us than we know about the invisible waves that guide insects to their goal. But He does

speak. And He does guide. He sent us His Son to show us the way to God -the way of forgiveness and love.

It draws us to Him; for it shows Him to be a Father who cares. But we have to tune-in. Faith is the antenna

that enables us to tune-in to God, and receive His truth into our lives. We have to believe that God is all He

says He is - a loving Father who sent His Son into the world to die for us. That belief will open the

channels of love between Him and us.

Episode No.202Nature Shows the Way - the way God has made provision, creatively and ingeniously, for all living things: most of all for man, to whom He is both Creator and Father God. Few creatures live farther from the source of things than the animals of the ocean depths- no light, no fresh air, little warmth, little food. So much the more ingenious is God's provision for their existence in the dark abyss.

Light is the source of all life energy. In the clearest water- that of the Sargossa Sea -it disappears, to the human eye, at about 500 feet. Yet animals live thousands of feet below the surface. Here, the temperature drops to little above zero, and light loses its colour -first the red and orange, then the yellow and green. Bright red animals look only a deep blue-black at these remote depths. How then, do the animals see, or find their way about?Many of them have huge eyes, with large pupils to let in as much light as possible. The retina has a great many rods- light sensitive cells that detect the merest glimmer of light: but no colour. The eyes are tubular, like a telescope: and directed upwards, towards the light. They're set side-by-side to give stereoscopic vision for the better judgement of distance: and they have two retinas for easier focusing. But, at the greatest depths, where there’s no light at all, fish have no eyes at all, or very small ones. Some have the rays of their fins extended into long probes, for feeling their way about the ocean floor. Others have the lateral line sense organs - these echo-ranging, scales that give fish their strange ability to feel out ahead - developed to such a sensitive degree that they can detect the very breathing movements of the animals that serve them for food. And some have their own living lanterns to light the depths. There's a fish in the Southern Oceans with two small searchlights that cast a beam far enough ahead to enable it to capture krill; and a deep-sea hermit crab that finds its way through the light of a luminous sea-anemone it carries with it.But even more important than sight is food. Where the light doesn't penetrate, green plants can't grow, and no food is produced. But it's relayed to the abyss from the light and life above. Rich supplies of plankton grow in the sunlit surface waters - and a food chain extends all the way down to the animals in the abyss. Big Mouths, fish that live in the bone-chilling cold and gloomy darkness at 9,000 feet, are specially built to take advantage of the rare pickings that come their way - right at the end of the food-chain. One way or another, all are fed.We often find ourselves in the gloom of despair. Thick darkness closes over us - there's no break in the clouds. But we need to remember that there's sunlight, and life-giving energy above. God is the source of life for man - the Sun of Love, Our Creator and Father God has undertaken to supply all our need if we trust Him. “With all His abundant wealth, through Christ Jesus” Paul said, “My God will supply all your need.” In the economy of God, the supply usually comes through others – as in the food chain of the ocean. And it comes best through the faculty of faith – God’s special provision for enabling man to see in the darkness, where His hand reaches out to meet our need. “You know how to give good gifts to your children” Jesus said. “How much more then will your Father in Heaven give good things to those who ask Him.”


Sargossa;deep sea;fish;retina;lateral line;senses;food chain;supply;


Seeing in DepthNature Shows the Way - the way in which God provides for living things, most of all for man. For, beyond supplying our physical needs, He provides the means by which we learn; and adjust to the world around us. And one of the things we have to learn is the art of seeing.

This isn't as simple as it may seem. Our eyes focus an image onto the tiny screen, or retina, that lies at the back of the eye. But it's an image in the form of activated pigment cells and electrical circuits to the brain - and it's upside down: Our minds have to turn it right-side-up; tell us what it represents; how far away the object is; what significance it holds for us - and much more. A newborn child hasn't yet developed a mind of this sort. Indeed, he hasn't even learnt to judge distance; and he has difficulty even in reaching out and touching something he sees. He has to build up, and store in his mind, whole chapters of information before he can learn to see intelligently.

What is this information that we store in the seeing centre of the mind? Some of it's about distance. And this is what gives perspective, bearing, and depth to our seeing. If a friend walks away from us into the distance, we see him growing smaller and smaller. Yet we know he's not really getting smaller. Our minds have learnt to interpret distance in terms of size. Other things help us to judge space. The lens of the eye alters its shape as it follows the retreating form; and the eyeballs turn a little in their sockets. When we move our heads - as we often do to get a "fix" on distant objects - the image of a near object moves more than that of a far-off one. All of these things give us clues about distance.

But the most useful information about space and depth come from the two eyes working together as a team. Each presents us with a slightly different picture - like a pair of binoculars, or the twin cameras that photograph a stereoscopic picture. Our eyes are set, side-by-side, on the front of the head - just for the purpose of giving us this sort of picture. Not so with some birds. A thrush, a blackbird, or a farmyard fowl, searching for a worm's tunnel or for food on the ground, bends its head to the side to peer closely with just one eye at a time. But when it needs to judge distance accurately, in order to pounce on its quarry, it uses both eyes at once. They combine images, to give a picture of the target in depth. This is because things in the foreground or background give slightly different images in either eye. And if the object moves, bits of background and foreground will be seen at a different time by each eye. So the object becomes fixed in space; it stands out, with depth, perspective and profile.


Seeing, then, is a complex process. Seeing in depth is more difficult still. The wires from eye to brain are alive with messages - from object, foreground, background. The brain itself is stored with seeing data from the past. It has to sift, select, discriminate and judge. What we observe has to be set into a framework of ideas – if it’s to achieve any meaning. Jesus said “You have eyes – but you don’t see.” What they saw had little or no meaning because they had little understanding. It’s easy to be confused by today’s world – unless we can get a true bearing on things. There’s only one way to achieve this perspective – by viewing life against the background of Christ’s cross. It alone sets everything into a world of true values – nothing less than the perspective and depth of the divine love the cross portrays. “God loved the world so much that He gave His Son.” This is what really gives life real meaning.


The growth of loveNature Shows the Way - the way from independence to love. Lower animals are often marked by

solitariness; higher animals by community in love. They gain from co-operation and the bond that grows between parent and young.

In the spider world, it's very much a case of "every man for himself" - or, more frequently, every female spider for herself. Spiders hunt by stealth, ambush, or snare - each spider in its own tunnel, lair, or web. Most of them would willingly feed on a fellow spider if it should become too familiar. For all that, the spider world is not without its co-operative communities where many combine to build a communal web. And even solitary hunters, like wolf spiders, spend long periods without food in order to care for their egg-sacs. They carry them about with them, sun them; and, when the spiderlings emerge, they're packed ,snugly onto their mother's back and carried with her wherever she goes. Nursery spiders build a protective silken nursery for their young; and even stand guard over it.

Insects are individualists, and care little for one another -or for their young. But here again we have the social insects -bees, ants, and wasps - which nurse their larvae carefully and nurse them in a social creche system. Members of a hive or nest contribute their own work freely - and even give their own lives to the care and defence of the nest.

Fish in general are as cold towards one another, and to their young, as they are to the touch. Most lay their eggs into water -and forget all about them. But the male stickleback is different. He builds a nest for the eggs, and guards them zealously. When the fry hatch, they're shepherded carefully into the nest. Female tilapia do more. They carry their eggs in their own mouths until they hatch, and shelter the young in the same secure retreat when danger threatens.

But it's in birds that we see real tenderness - with the development of the pair-bond as a real part of living. The male woos the female; and together they establish a home territory and a nest, sometimes holding to one another, and to the home site, for life. Established rituals cement the pair-bond. The lyre bird makes a clearing in the forest and uses it as a platform or stage for his performance of song and dance. His soft courting song is a language that draws the hen bird to him; and the beautiful spread of the lyre feathers a courtship dress that seems to weave a spell of friendship between them.

In mammals, bonds are equally strong. And they're cemented with the long life-span that mammals enjoy, and with the intelligence and understanding they bring to their relationships. Elephants, living for perhaps seventy years, become so attached to one another that they're often left in a frenzy of distress and grief when one of their number dies.

And so it is in the human world. Love grows. And so, too, does bitterness and prejudice. Man is capable of the best - and the worst - because he is capable of great love. Love must find an outlet. It can be turned in on itself to become self-love, which is slavery: destructive, bitter, and dangerous. Or it can be released into self-giving and service to others. This sort of other-love comes only from God. It's part of the life of God; and man, by himself is quite incapable of it. We see it truly at work when God gave His Son - part of His own self - to die for the very people who hated and opposed Him, to reconcile men to their Father God. "This is how we know what love is” John said. “Christ gave his life for us. We too, then, ought to give our lives for our brothers.”

211; Co-operation; spider; social insects; stickleback; tiapia; nests; lyre; love;


The Hostile WorldNature Shows the Way - the way God has given living things their means of facing what is often a

very hostile world.

Most plants are openly exposed to the rigours of climate. Some suffer severely from lack of moisture - not only in the desert where water is scarce, but equally at the sea-shore where it abounds. They're like a mariner at sea, without any means of finding water to drink. In a watery environment, they could die of thirst. This is due to the delicate balance of water and salts in living cells. In taking up water from the salty soil, most plants also take up an overdose of salts.

But some don't. Mangroves grow knee-deep in salt water. Tides shift in and out amongst their roots. At high tide they're water-logged in brine. At low-tide fresh water flowing in from a river may cover them. Now they adapt to one; now to the other. To assist their breathing in the water-logged, air-deficient silt, they have aerial roots that feed oxygen down into the root system below. To help them resist the saltiness of the water they have a sort of ultra-filtration device to produce a supply of fresh water, especially for their seedlings. They contrive to take in less salt than other plants would; and they're specially built to tolerate a high concentration of it. Salt glands get rid of much of the salt they do absorb; water-storage tissue dilutes what remains. Then they have that clever idea for establishing their tender seedlings in salty mud. They germinate them while the seed is still on the parent plant, so that the young plant floats out onto the tide, ready to take quick foothold when the time is opportune.

Higher up on the shifting sand-dunes of ocean beaches, we have another type of plant specially built to face a climate that's even more austere. Lashed with strong in-shore winds, struggling to keep up with the level of shifting sand, and faced with the problem of obtaining food and water from sand that doesn't contain much of either, these plants need special equipment to survive. And they have it -long, flexible leaves that bend to the wind; breathing holes concealed in deep trenches; spreading underground stems that adjust to the changing sand level and roots that reach out far in search of food and moisture.

Behind these sand hills, and in estuaries and inlets high tides penetrate, to flood the land with a salty sediment. Here grow salt marsh and salt meadow plants - pioneers that colonise the land after the retreating sea. Some have succulent stems and leaves to store fresh water. Some have glands that are able to extract salt from the sap, and shed it as salty droplets on the leaves. Some have hairs, bladders, or leaves that accumulate salt and then fall from the plant.

By means such as these, plants manage to grow - and indeed thrive - in a very hostile world. The world can be just as hostile to us. Difficulties and frustrations crowd in upon us, and seem to make life impossible. We need inner resources - something special, such as the salt-marsh plants possess - to see us through. And just such resources are available for the asking. God never meant life to be easy. He does mean us to use the inner strength, the invisible resources, available. He never leaves us to face the conflicts of life alone. I am with you always, to the end of time Jesus said. And He was God's Son, who faced life in all its bitterness. There's no other way to know a Father's love and care than by trusting him. When we do this we find that He's at our side, with an invisible presence that understands, strengthens, and provides for us.

212; plants; moisture; mangrove; salt water; aerial roots; seedling; harsh environment; adapting; difficulties;


ParenthoodNature Shows the Way - the way God as Father provides for the life of His creatures. Parenthood is one of these ways - parents taking responsibility for their young, at a time when they're vulnerable to danger and want.

There’s little of this sort of responsibility in some animals. Eggs are laid and forgotten. Young emerge in some form - often very different from their parents. They're cast out into an inhospitable world - in great numbers - to take their chance with predators, cold, and starvation. And not many survive.

Some are more fortunate. They benefit from the instincts of their parents. These parents follow a pattern of innate behaviour. The digger wasp has an instinctive routine that guides it into good parenthood. Each female wasp goes through its particular routine – untaught - digging a tunnel which will serve as a nursery for its larva, paralysing a spider or caterpillar with a sting, placing it in the tunnel, laying an egg on it; then packing the mouth of the tunnel to make it secure. That's the end of its parental responsibility. When the grub emerges, it has the right food to grow, and a safe retreat to develop in.

Other animals receive more personal care - in a home presided over by parents. Beavers pair for life, and work together to build a family lodge, before their first litter arrives. They labour hard to fell trees and build a dam. Then they carry sticks and mud until the lodge rises out of the water to provide a cosy living chamber, high and dry, for the coming family. In it, the kits have a safe home, with an under-water passage through which they're led to the water and given their first lessons in building and repairing the dam.

But parents provide more than a home. They add a home-range, a familiar bit of living space, that the young animals may move into from nest or den. An opossum may have its own tree. But animals like elephants may extend their roadways or trails for miles. Along these trails are "signposts" marked usually by scent; "rubbing posts" that serve as landmarks; sunning grounds, play-grounds, mud-baths; and, even more important, hiding-places which make a safe retreat or refuge in times of danger. All these well-known spots are “home” to members of the young family. They provide security - and a "school" in which parents teach young the arts of adult living. Birds turn this home-range into a jealously guarded territory, where male birds sing and posture to warn all intruders off. It becomes a feeding-range, for parents and young - with "all rights reserved."

In all of these ways - whether by instinct or intent - parents take responsibility for their young. They work hard to feed them, protect them, keep them warm. They teach them - by example or reproof - the arts of living. They labour to provide a home and a secure retreat. Many defend their young with their own lives. God is a Father to us: we are His offspring made in His image - children of God. Many see Him as a tyrant or puppet-master; and blame Him for all the ills and frustrations of life and earth - while accepting all His good gifts without comment or gratitude. But God is a responsible Father. Any doubt about this was dispelled for ever when He gave Himself - in His Son - to die for us. He has given us life -and the best possible home in our planet Earth. He teaches us the way of life in His word, and in the example of His Son. We have the best security of all - that of a Father's love. He offers us the very best in parenthood. "I


have come that you might have life" Jesus said, "life in all its fullness."

213; Parenthood; digger wasp; beaver; kit; rubbing post; territory; home; responsibility;


ChildhoodNature Shows the Way - the way God cares for His creatures as they grow and develop, guiding them through life with ingenious instincts and clever adaptations. Childhood is a precarious time for all animals. But few are left helpless. Those unaccompanied by parents are guided through life by inborn responses to its opportunities and dangers. Others become part of a family, and grow up with the fuller help that parenthood provides

What does childhood hold for an insect? If you're a young mantis, you'll be born from an egg-case in spring - alone in the world, hungry for food, with the mind and equipment of a hunter. Scissor-shaped front legs, that can snap onto a tiny insect, are already folded, poised for action, on your chest. You've only to follow a moving quarry with your eyes, and your mind programmes these legs to strike - in the right direction, and at lightning speed: to imprison your prey. So you eat - and grow.

If you happen to be a crab, you'll be born into the vastness of the ocean, and you'll probably take your place, with millions of others, in the plankton, that floating mass of small creatures, most of which will never grow to maturity.

You'll be part of a food chain - to eat or be eaten. Only if you're one of the fortunate ones will you ever live out your developing childhood.

If you're an amphibian, you're born into an open water nursery - this time a pond or stream - and you'll have to look after yourself. As you feed and develop, you change from tadpole to frog by growing legs, losing your gills, and replacing them by lungs, until you finally step out onto land, breathe air instead of dissolved oxygen, and exchange your vegetarian pond diet for a richer meal of insects that you hunt in the grass.

Young birds have a more luxurious childhood. They're born into a comfortable nest and fed and cared for by devoted parents, who spend the day carrying them food. And when they leave the nest, they share ownership of a feeding territory, jealously guarded by a parent patrol. They're part of a family, do as their parents do - and so grow up to sing and fly.

Young mammals, like birds, are born to the good life. Suckled on a mother's milk, enjoying a close and personal relationship with her, they experience a long childhood, full of play by which they develop the skills of adult life. And if their parents belong to a herd or flock, they participate in a social life and become part of a larger whole as they change and grow.

Human children are the best cared for of all. Besides growing in years and wisdom beyond all the others, they become part of a human tradition, loaded with knowledge and skills - a rich society of people and institutions. Play, education, and language accompany a long childhood. Children learn to choose, make decisions, and develop ideas that will take them far beyond the instinctive behaviour of other creatures. But there's more: children of human parents are also children of a Father God. The incredible world they live in is only part of the rich heritage He offers them. Trained in intelligent choice, they have the option of joining a wider family - the family of God. Its nature was clearly shown when God sent His Son to earth to reconcile men to Himself, and bring them back into the family. He did this by showing the Father's love for His children in the greatest act of self-giving the world has known - a life lived for men, and a life given for men, on the Cross. “See how much the Father has loved us!” John says "His love is so great that we are called God's children - and so, in fact, we are."

214; Childhood; mantis; plankton; family;


Agents of Release

Nature Shows the Way - the way God has provided, creatively and imaginatively, for life in all its intricacy.

Part of this intricacy is the complex regulation of body processes – processes that keep everything in balance within the body (temperature, blood pressure, salts in the blood) - processes that enable the body to grow and develop - processes that bring important changes to the body: just at the time when such changes are needed.

In most of these operations you’ll find hormones at work. They're the chemical messengers despatched to various parts of the body - to release the elements of change. Very small amounts of the right hormone, directed to the right part of the body, can bring about remarkable transformations. Many of these changes have to do with growth and reproduction - changing insects from feeding larvae to breeding adults; telling birds when to migrate for nesting; giving animals the signal to reproduce - and at the most favourable season. Blueprints for all such changes are stowed away, ready for use, in every cell of the body. Hormones are the agents that release them - just when and where they're needed.

To do this job, the hormones have to be transported from the glands that manufacture them to the cells that use them. Usually they're carried in the blood - and to all cells everywhere. The important question is how each is brought into action at the right place, at the right time - say, to produce egg-white when it's needed for a bird's egg; or to bring a mammal into milk production when its calf is born in spring.

Now, the steroid hormones that cause these effects are all alike - yet different. They're small molecules - small enough to get into any kind of cell, through the cell wall. They can leave the cell just as easily, and get back into the blood. This is just what happens -in most cells. But not in the cells which are the special target of a particular hormone. Waiting for the hormone in its target cell is a special receptor molecule, which grabs it, welcomes it, and holds it. Coupled together the hormone molecule and its receptor enter the control room of the cell - the nucleus. Here, in the nucleus, is stored the genetic "master-tape” found in all cells. Somewhere along its length is a particular receptor site - which just matches this special hormone. The receptor molecule conducts the hormone to this site. It attaches itself here - and releases the machinery of the site to action.


This brings a whole new sequence of events into operation - for there's a unique pattern at this point on the "master-tape". It's the set of instructions needed to produce say, the egg white for a bird's egg, or the milk for a newly born calf. The hormone has released the potential for a new and exciting event.

There’s a master plan somewhere in our own lives - as there is in every cell of the body. It's a unique plan - like no other. But it has to be released - brought into operation. It's a plan that can make use of the special talents and capabilities we all possess. Most of us use these powers for our own benefit - if we use them at all. But love is a great releaser. It frees us from ourselves, and brings us into a constructive relationship with others. Jesus came to release men - by reconciling them to God; by introducing the element of love into human lives. We become part of the family of God: brothers with our fellow man. We're released into world citizenship - and use our powers and capabilities to serve. We're set free - free to obey the commands of love. "This is my commandment," Jesus said. "Love one another as I have loved you." It’s the only way to live life in all its richness.


What we can do with Light

Nature shows the way - the way God provides, creatively and ingeniously for life in its many forms. One of His most remarkable provisions is light. It gives colour and variety to life.

Light comes to us from the sun as a mixed bundle of wavelengths from the long infrared waves, which we can feel but can't see to the short ultra-violet that only certain insects can detect. In between are the various colours, which our eyes lump together and call white light. But we seldom see these light waves directly. They're bounced at us from various objects - and at different angles. Because or this, we see light in all sorts of colours and shades -because some waves are lost, while others are scattered, bent, or diverted. Precious stones owe their charm to the tricks they're able to play with light waves, before they finally ricochet them to our eyes. The colours we see aren't in the stone – they’re in the light.

Take diamond. It's made of carbon - the same substance as graphite or charcoal. But it treats light very differently - because its molecules are arranged to give crystal faces, which reflect light, and prisms, which spread it into various colours. They give diamond its fiery flashes. Other gemstones absorb some wavelengths and pass others on - to give a mixture of bright colours and dark bands. Pearls are laid down in layers, each layer reflecting light waves separate1y. The reflected waves meet crest to crest to give pearl its beautiful iridescence.

Opals are different again. They have a milky lustre, with a deep-seated play of colour; for opal has its own way of dealing with 1ight. And this depends on its structure, deep within; and on

the way it was put together in the first place. It's thought that opals are produced in a very special manner - though from very ordinary materials. Over a long period of' time, tiny spheres of silica settle from water onto an underlying bed of hard clay. They're all of a size, and they settle in a most orderly manner - like beads, in layers, with holes between them. Light waves entering opal meet these holed layers. They act like a diffraction grating - a tool that scientists use to separate the colours from light. It reinforces different wavelengths. And the reinforced waves are thrown back out of the stone as bright colours - pure colours. They contrast with other waves that are absorbed by impurities in the stone. The pleasant milky opalescence itself is caused by scattering of the white light - off


some more irregular arrays of particles in the opal.

Stones are precious - because of the way they deal with light, separating it into its various colours. Plants treat light in another way; they extract energy from it to build foodstuffs. Pigments are experts in using light. They produce colour because they absorb some wavelengths from white light, and pass on others. Eye and mind employ light in still another way. They teach us about the world around us - because they read the patterns in light waves and pick up messages from them. Light is God's gift to us. It holds the potential for life itself. We all read it differently; and gain our own insights from it. God sent His Son to be the light and life of the world. If we let Him into our lives, we shall reflect a little of his own life and beauty - each one of us differently, as a gem reflects its own special colours from a source within. In gemstones, the colour and fire are from the light; not from the stone. Yet the stone is needed to bring the colour out. In human lives, the true fire comes from God - but it's revealed through human personality. "We all reflect, as in a mirror, the splendour of the Lord" Paul says. "And we're transformed into His own likeness.”


Light ReceptorsNature Shows the Way - the way God enters His world, creatively and ingeniously, to provide for the livelihood of all its creatures. In providing light for the world, He also provided a means of using it. He gave us pigments - substances that absorb the energy of light waves and make it available to living things.

Pigments are specialists dealing in light. They bring out its hidden colours - that's why they're useful to painters and fabric makers. But some of them do much more than this - they produce food materials. And they enable us to see.

Light is a spectrum of many colours - all of them invisible to our eyes. Pigments make them visible. They give colour to our world, by reflecting certain wavelengths of light and passing them on to our eyes - as colours. Other pigments, again, feed us and give us sight by absorbing certain wavelengths and using their energy to bring about important changes. This is how it all happens:

There's a special pigment - visual purple - in the retina of the eye. It's located in the myriad of tightly packed cells, called rods. Light is reflected from objects we look at; and it's focused onto these rods. Here, each molecule of visual purple traps a photon of light; becomes changed in the process; and reverses an electric charge across a membrane. This charge is passed on to a nerve, which takes a message to the brain. Millions of tiny cells build up a pattern in the mind - and we see.

Plants have pigments too - but not for seeing. In the green leaf we find tiny pigment granules, called chloroplasts. They're arranged in layers between a double membrane. And they're there to trap light photons. Now, these light particles, travelling at 186,000 miles a second, are powerful agents of change. They split the tenacious water molecule clear apart; and start a chain reaction in which electrons, passed from point to point, finally produce both starch molecules for food, and oxygen for breathing.

Recent work has brought still another interesting bit of pigment chemistry to light. It takes place in salt-loving bacteria. They have a special problem living in salt lakes, where there's too much salt, but not enough oxygen. So the bacteria look to a pigment to supply their oxygen needs. It's visual purple - the same pigment that enables us to see. In this case, it's found in a membrane that encloses the


bacterial cell. The sunlight beaming onto the salt lake is trapped in the purple membrane, where it powers a proton pump. This pumping action forces charged particles

through the membrane. As they flow back, they feed power into a chemical energy bank that stores energy for breathing and living.

Pigments are transducers. They change light energy into energy for living - chemical energy for food; electrical energy for seeing; electro-chemical energy for oxygen and breathing. We, too, are agents of light - God's light. When we look to Him, we absorb the light of truth and love. Truth is no abstraction: it's a Person - Jesus, God’s son. And we see it best in His face, and life. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus said. This light is charged with love’s energy. It has power to change lives - as sunlight has power to change substances. And, like the pigments, it can start a chain reaction: that finally leads to life itself. We all have a capacity for truth - for absorbing the light that comes to us. And we have the ability to pass on the light of truth: to reflect it in the many colours that our own personality imparts. It’s the greatest privilege that life has to offer.


Beacons of Light and Life Nature Shows the Way - the way God enters the lives of His creatures to provide guidance, direction, and all the needs of daily living. In the world of the firefly, guidance and light are necessary as much by night as by day. For it's their beacons of light, shining in the darkness, that lead a male firefly to his mate, and end in reproduction and new life.

We're all familiar with the idea of the flashing light. At airports, it guides the aircraft in to a safe landing. In the world of the motor vehicle it indicates direction - or, in the police car, warning. In a lighthouse its colour-coding and rhythmic flashing gives both guidance and warning to ships.


Most of these flashing lights are heat-generated. An electric current heats a wire: some of the energy produces light but the greater part is lost as heat. Fireflies use flashing lights too: but

they're light efficient. All the light they produce is cold light; none of it's lost as heat. Very efficient enzyme action produces energy-charged molecules. As they drop to a less excited state, they give out photons of heat - green in some fireflies, bright yellow in others. It's a signal - to lead the male firefly to his mate. In open country, the males are roving suitors. They fly about singly, the male flashing his light as he goes, in a code that both sexes understand. The female replies in the same code, after a fixed interval of time. So, in a courtship display of flashing lights, the male is drawn to the female - that is, if he doesn't fall prey to a jumping frog, also attracted to the

light flash. Some frogs eat so many fireflies that they too begin to glow with light.

But tropical fireflies, in the jungles of South East Asia, need a different sort of light display. Single flashes aren't so readily seen in the gloom of the forest. So the tropical fireflies stage a massed display. It's the sight of a lifetime for a canoe traveller paddling up a forest-fringed river. Lines of mangrove trees pulsate to the rhythmic illumination of fireflies on their leaves, the flash of every insect in perfect time with its neighbours all down the river. It's not that each follows the flash of another - they all flash at precisely the same instant. How do they achieve such remarkable synchronization?

The answer seems to be an internal pace-maker, regulated to the code of the particular species. It's probably an oscillatory nerve cell, operating like the capacitors that monitor some flashing lights in our cities. There's a build-up of charge across the membrane of the cell; then it's suddenly released, to time the flash. When a firefly first switches on its light, its pace-maker takes its timing from the massed flashing - just as a clock is reset on winding. Then it continues in perfect time with the rest.

So we find that the clever innovations of civilised man are no novelty to the natural world. They operate on similar principles but not nearly so efficiently as they do in nature. God's ingenious provisions for His creatures lead insect to insect; illuminate the darkness; guide and direct. He has a guiding beacon for us too, lighting the world’s darkness, and directing us to Himself. It’s the light from the cross of his Son. It sends a ray of hope down through the centuries. Shining through the gloom and frustration of a world darkened by sin and self-interest, it offers the alternative of love and self-forgetfulness. Its message is resurrection, forgiveness, reconciliation, new life – a fresh beginning. It has all the energy of self-giving love – and its message is clear: “I have loved you with everlasting love: therefore, with unfailing love I have drawn you.”

A Plan for GrowthNature Shows the Way - the way God has planned and established the lives of His creatures. An important part of this is the building of a body - different in every species of animal or plant - indeed in every individual. The construction of the body itself -from a one-celled egg to a grown plant or animal - is a miracle of growth and development. But prior to construction is plan and design. And this is no less remarkable. It goes something like this -A master plan for body growth is stowed away in every body cell.

It's marked “Reference Only” and it's held in the safe-room of the cell nucleus. Parts of it are transcribed and used, as required, for the cells own manufacture of bodybuilding materials. These parts are read off from a sort of tape library or data bank onto messenger molecules that are allowed to enter the safe-room and make copies. No cell uses the whole tape, but only the parts that concern it - say, bone-building instructions for bone-cells. And these instructions are made available only when they're needed -say, when an insect's biological clock tells it that the season is right for a change. The juvenile hormone that keeps it in its larval form is phased out, and the plan for winged adulthood is brought into operation in each cell.

How this switching of production - and all the changes it brings - comes about, has been studied in detail in a virus. A bit of very clever genetic chemistry has made it possible to actually divide the instruction tape - a long DNA molecule - into its separate parts, and read the words from selected portions of its data bank. They make a very complicated set of instructions - even in a simple organism like a virus. For it takes

about 1,000 units, or base-pairs, along the chain to set out the code for just one gene, or instructional unit - and there are about fifty genes in a virus - few compared with the number in our own very complex bodies. When the gene is copied, and fed into the production unit of a cell, it can supervise the manufacture of its own particular protein molecule, and so contribute to the growth of the body.

Now, these genes can be switched on and off as required. Special sites have been discovered at intervals along the chain, where a switching molecule - called a repressor - can recognise the writing, and then clamp tightly onto a particular part of the DNA tape. This prevents access of the messenger molecule - for the time - to this part of the library, and holds up any production of these body parts. The repressor can be unclamped at just the right time - and the gene is freed for expression. In the virus, this could take place when conditions become favourable for growth. The repressor is thrown off, the production machinery is brought into action, and the virus can multiply and take over its host cell. In our own bodies, dormant genes can be freed for expression

as we grow; so that childhood blossoms into adolescence, and

youth develops into maturity.

It would be strange indeed if God had made such remarkable provision for our bodily growth, and none for our life growth. But that isn't so. He has a plan of growth, different for every individual, and personality. As we trust Him, we find more areas of His great plan freed for expression; inhibitions are lost; every day becomes a new adventure in freedom. The master plan for our own lives is found in the life of His Son on earth. He showed us a new way of living - by giving instead of getting. Paul gave expression to it when he said, "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty ... There's no veil over the face, we all reflect as in a mirror the splendour of the Lord; so we're changed into His likeness.”

Walls of SeparationNature Shows the Way - the way God .as Creator and Sustainer provides for the life of His creatures - by devices that are always appropriate: and often incredibly wonderful. One of these devices is the wall that divides, yet communicates - the wall that encloses a living cell.

Ancient cities were enclosed by walls to protect them from invasion and destruction. Living cells have their protecting walls too. Each cell is an enclosed city. Yet it’s, in constant communication with Its surrounding world - the sap, blood, or body fluids which bathe it. They provide the raw materials for its food-building and other life processes; and they carry away its waste products. The cell is a city of molecules, specially designed to serve the changing needs of life itself. The cell wall keeps them apart from the less specialised, and less organised world outside. It maintains the integrity and life of the cell.

Now this wall is a bi-layer of molecules - a sort of picket fence around the cell. They're fatty molecules with water-attracting heads, and water-repelling tails. In a watery solution, they line up side-by-side - heads pointing outwards into the watery world outside; tails pointing inwards into the space between the two layers. This seals the cell off, like a walled city. But it doesn't destroy its lines of communication. For the wall is alive and active, like the cell itself. There's a constant traffic in and out through it. But it's carefully controlled traffic. The boundary membrane chooses the entrants it needs. For the wall has protein channels running out through the fatty molecules. And it has carrier molecules operating in the channels. These carriers are able to recognise the materials that are necessary for the life of the cell. It conveys them through the channels, delivers them, and returns for more. There are pores in the membrane too, through which water-soluble salts enter. And fat-soluble materials enter the cell by way of the fatty molecules.

All of this results in the selective entrance of the right materials. But it's not an easy entrance - for it's against an "uphill' gradient. This is because the cell sap is denser than the outside environment; sometimes hundreds of times denser. So a mole-cular pump, operated by chemical energy, is provided in the layers of the membrane. It "pumps" the right materials into the cell. There's another type of energy available in the cell wall too - electrical energy. The cell wall is "alive" electrically. It's this "aliveness" of a nerve-cell wall that carries the electrical message along a nerve. When we see, too, it's because electrical signals stimulated by light, move across a cell membrane. And every time a muscle contracts, also, charged calcium particles cross a membrane.

Beyond the cell, there's the body. And it's a walled city too, separate and apart - but with channels through to the outside world: ears to hear, eyes to see, senses to feel and experience. Life always means separation. It means developing an identity and a personality of one's own. But it also means communication - keeping in touch with one's sources - of food, energy, information, under-standing. There's always a separating wall, between life and what's outside it. But the wall has to be crossed. There has to be a supply from outside. God gave us life - and with it personality, something unique to each one of us. We’re separate and novel - beings in our own right. For all that, we're dependencies of God. He's our Source. He wants us to be just what we are - but filled with a fullness of life that can come only from Him, as light comes from the sun. He's provided a channel through to Him - and at much cost. His Son came to live and die for us. Through Him we have life, in its fullness.

220; cell wall; communication; molecular pump; nerves; selective transmission; personality;

Springs of ActionNature Shows the Way - the way God as Creator designed living things: with beauty and taste to match purpose and function. Some of these designs are apparent to the eye. Others are hidden, and await discovery. Such is the design of the mind, so intricate as to elude comprehension. But recent work with marker molecules has brought a trace of its hidden wonder to light.

The steroid hormones are chemical messengers that travel in the blood, and reach all parts of the body. But they have special target areas - some of them in the brain, where they work on the nerve circuits and help to fashion the mind itself. In doing so, they influence behaviour, and produce patterns of thought and action that, in the human world, can be responsible for the most devastating crime - or the tenderest feelings of love.

In recent experiments, these hormones have been labelled with a radioactive substance and traced to some of their receptor areas. They're able to change and influence nerve circuits - either permanently or temporarily. It's been possible to trace out these nerve pathways as a series of black dots, in the brain of such animals as a rat.

The story begins early in the life of the creature, before the design of the mind has been fully established. There are sensitive areas that are subject to change; and a sensitive period, just after birth, when the hormones are able to influence the very pattern of brain development in these areas. If the male hormone readies them at the right time, certain things begin to happen. It binds onto special receptor proteins set there for the purpose. The protein molecule, loaded with its hormone, is then admitted to the nucleus of the nerve cell where the genes that determine behaviour are stored. It gives the signal there for the turning on of particular genes, the male ones, and the turning off of others, the femaleness. This, in turn, results in the production of appropriate nerve cells, and the formation of contacts between them. In this way, pathways of behaviour are built into the mind. They result in the animal behaving as a male for the rest of its life. Its springs of action are established, once and for all. And so are those of the female animal - but in a different way. She has a hormone-binding protein circulating in her blood. It traps the hormone, and prevents it from reaching the receptor cells. So she remains with the brain pattern of a female.

In this way, the roots of maleness and femaleness are established at birth. But their expression comes later - when time, season, and circumstance call for special events in the life of the animal. Birds will show such responses as the nesting season approaches. The lengthening days of spring are measured by a biological clock: hormones are released into the blood; male and female circuits are activated; and all the remarkable inter-relationships that stimulate song, territory, mating, and the rearing of a family are brought into play.

By such ingenious means as these, God provides for the fitting behaviour of His creatures.. More than that, He has provided pathways of communication and response through to Himself. His messenger is His Son, who lived and died for us. - Response to the love He has shown us can create permanent pathways of love and action in our minds. "Love has a way of being constructive,” the Bible says. It provides an escape route from the closed circuits of self that enslave and inhibit. We're released into the glorious liberty of the children of God. The course of our thought takes a new turn. We're able to grow into true adulthood, conscious of a creative

and fulfilling role in life.

221; marker molecules; steroids; hormones; genes; behaviour; biological clock;

Elements of LifeNature Shows the Way the way God as Creator has built life and the world in which we live - by combining simple

elements into all sorts of rich designs.

Life is tremendously complex with an intricacy of form and a relationship of parts that science has scarcely begun to sort out and understand. Each plant and animal is itself a city of life molecules, with traffic passing to and fro in a finely balanced stream of activity. Just so, outside each body there's a huge eco-system of which the body is only a tiny part. And again the whole is organised into a strangely workable complex.

But from all this intricacy of design some basic elements can be sorted out. The Greeks thought there were four of them - earth, air, fire and water. We now know about 100, and we call them the chemical elements. They're basic because they can't be broken down into anything simpler. They're the building blocks of life. Two of them are liquids, eleven of them gases; the rest are solids. By putting them together in various combinations, the whole of the earth and sky has been framed. Yet most of the 100 play a very minor part. Almost all of what we see - our bodies and the earth around us - is built from only about fifteen of them.

How are these elements put together to make the complex framework of nature? The answer lies in bonding. Each element contains atoms of a kind. They're miniature solar systems, each with a central nucleus and, around it, orbiting shells of electrons. It's the outer shells of electrons that bond atom to atom. The atoms seek stability by sharing (or exchanging) the electrons in their outer shells. In this way they produce bonded substances, called compounds - usually quite different in appearance from the elements they contain. Shiny elements like the metals join with other elements to form crystals, rocks, and minerals - all very different from the shiny metal itself.

The simplest element is hydrogen, with only one electron. It's also the most common. Its atoms are found everywhere in space. On earth, they bond strongly with another gas, oxygen, to form liquid water - the commonest substance on earth.

But the element of life itself is carbon. It has four bonds, reaching out in every direction, to draw other elements into its orbit. Attached in this way to other life elements - hydrogen and oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur - it forms chains and repeating units called polymers. They form tenacious fibres and woods, useful to us for clothing, construction, and fuel. But, more importantly, they produce the macromolecules of life, proteins. Making full use of carbon’s versatile bonds, the body manufactures proteins for every conceivable purpose, each different from the others, giving life its variety; and plants, animals and people their individuality. With its outgoing bonds, carbon has ten times as many compounds to its credit as all the other elements combined.

Bonds are essential to life. They draw people together into constructive and fulfilling life patterns. They’re the product of faith and love, the elemental qualities of life. Faith prompts us to do things. Love shows us how to do them - constructively. “Faith works through love." They both have bonding qualities, drawing man to God; and man to man. The bonds of love have their origin in God alone - for "God is love." He sent His Son to earth to show us a Heavenly Father's love; and to draw us to Him. We can build our lives on faith and love. They' re the only true building blocks. They're the elemental qualities of life. "I pray that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith," Paul says, "and that you may have your roots and foundation in love."

222; Elements; Bonds; Molecules; Compounds; Polymers;

Agents of LifeNature Shows the Way - the way God gives life; to plants, animals, and men, and sustains it by pouring in energy from

above.

Life seems to spring continuously from the bare earth, as seeds germinate and grow. Living plants develop from an apparently lifeless soil; animals get their life from plants; and man depends for his livelihood on both plants and animals. But when we examine the life process more closely we find its origin is as much in the stars as on the earth - because it's only energy radiated from the sun that can bring the earth to life. The molecules of life are incredibly complex - they can be constructed only with the aid of cosmic power from sunlight. Without light, we're a closed system, with no capacity for development or change.

Now the building agent or power unit that opens this door to change for us is leaf-green - chlorophyll. If a solution of leaf-green is irradiated with blue light, it gives out a glow of red wavelengths, fluorescing like a neon night sign. It's been activated by the fast-travelling photons of light. But in the green plant this photochemistry doesn't produce red light; it builds life molecules.

The modern understanding of the atom shows us how this can happen. The nucleus of an atom is encircled by orbiting shells of electrons, travelling at speed. If one of these electrons should be hit by a light particle - of just the right wavelength - it will take up the energy of the fast-moving light particle, and jump into a new orbit. When it "falls to earth" again, in its old shell, it gives up this energy, and sets alive an energy chain in the cell's chemical laboratory. After a bit of very complicated chemistry, this energy chain releases the tightly bound hydrogen atom from water; transfers it to the carbon dioxide molecule; and builds a carbohydrate - the first step of the life process. Energy has been introduced into the system from an outside source; a complex molecule has been built; and an entirely new kind of chemistry, the chemistry of life, begins.

Now, chlorophyll is a pigment. Pigments are able to absorb and use certain wavelengths of light - and pass on others. Chlorophyll passes on the green wavelengths: that give it its colour, leaf-green. It absorbs red and blue: this gives it its power - for light particles at these wavelengths are able to activate the chlorophyll molecules. It's thought that about three hundred of them work together as a manufacturing machine. Some of them work as "antennae" to gather in solar energy. Others transfer this energy to a reaction centre where it's used to build up the large life molecules. These changes take place at enormous speed. They're difficult to follow. So all the chemistry of the green leaf hasn't yet been worked out by man. But the light-gathering chlorophyll molecule remains the key to change. It's an agent of life.

People who know God glow with His love. They're irradiated with energy from Him - and they pass it on, lighting the world’s darkness with the power of love. They're agents of life. The energy they gather from above brings something quite new into man's system -the sort of love and care that expends itself unconditionally. This sort of love-energy is as free as sunlight; for God's love falls on all, regardless of race, estate, or merit. Yet not all receive it. It requires a special faculty - like that of chlorophyll - the faculty of receptiveness, called faith. It joins man to God, his power supply; and man to man, his brother. Life is all receiving. "I ask God," said Paul, "to give you power through His Spirit to be strong in your inner selves." This is the chemistry of God - to provide energy for change and growth in the lives of those who trust Him.

223; Pigments; chlorophyll; life; receptivity; solar power;

Finding Each OtherNature Shows the Way, the way God as Creator provides for the life of His creatures. One way in which He

does this is by ingenious means of communication, enabling them to keep in touch with one another in all sorts of difficult life situations.

Crickets live in the grass jungle or amongst leaves, foraging individually for food. In the mating season, they have to find each other. Their eyes show them little beyond the maze of grass stems - so crickets sing to keep in touch. They're famous for their songs, which are a mixture of musical chirps and trills. In Eastern countries they're even caged, and kept as pets, for the music they provide. The male is the singer; the female is a good listener, picking up the song she knows with ears on her front shins, and making her way through the grass to the male of her species. Since there are many species of cricket, she has to be able to choose the right song in order to find a suitable mate. Of all the three thousand species of cricket, no two have the same song.

Now, the male sings by raising his forewings above the back and rubbing them together. A scraper on one forewing rubs across a toothed file on the other. And the pitch of the song varies with the number of teeth and the speed with which the wings are moved. Not only is the pitch different in the different species: the sequence of chirps and trills is different too. So each kind of cricket has its own song. It's the song that the female of the species is tuned to listen for.

But how does a male cricket know the song that will attract his mate? Does he learn it from others? Practice it until he gets it right? Is he born with it? Or does it develop as he grows? He's certainly not born with a song; for young crickets, or nymphs, have no wings to sing with. But he is born with a song pattern. It's encoded in the genes of each species. Crickets grow by shedding their skins in ten successive moults. Wings start to grow with the first moult; they're fully-grown at the last one. Experiments show that the nerve network controlling their movement - and, with it, the song pattern - develops stage-by-stage with the wing growth. Nerve cells send out branching fibres, called neurones, like the wires of an electrical circuit. They grow towards one another, and connect by "switches," or synapses, to form a patterned circuit. The whole growth of the circuit is directed from a blueprint for the species in the germ cells. At the last moult, the wings are fully-grown; the nerve circuits are complete, ready for switching on; and the male is able to sing - unerringly - the song of his kind.

Meanwhile, the listening circuits of the female have developed to the same pattern. She's able to detect the right song that leads her to the male of her choice.

Instinct is patterned behaviour. It's all important in the lower animals - and important in our lives too. More important to us, however, is intelligence. It enables us to comprehend life, and direct our own behaviour in a way that animals can't. Even more significant in our lives is faith. It's the faculty that links us directly with God, who alone is able to guide us into the truly human path of life. By faith, we hear God's voice and are able to respond to it. We find that we can call Him Father; and rest secure in His love. As the grass-stern jungle separates crickets, so in the jungle of life we become separated from one another - and from God. But there's opportunity for reconciliation. God sent His Son to earth for that very purpose. "I will never turn away anyone who comes to Me" Jesus said. The channels of reconciliation are wide open.

224; Cricket; song; identification; instinct; song pattern; patterned behaviour;

Care CentresNature Shows the Way - the way God makes provision for the smooth and efficient operation of our bodies - down to the

last practical detail of movement, behaviour, or mood.

All over our bodies - and in the bodies of most animals - are care centres that work a thousand miracles each day. They regulate our behaviour and look after the hundreds of details of bodily function that our conscious minds couldn't possibly find time to cope with.

Now, there are two sorts of muscle in the body. There are those which move our limbs. They work to our command: when we say, "Go" they work: when we say “Stop" they rest. But there are others that don't wait for any command. They operate our heart, lungs, skin, glands and our digestive system every moment of the day - without conscious thought on our part. When we pant with exertion: when our hearts race; when our mouths water; when we sweat profusely; when we become pale with apprehension or blush in confusion - it's these involuntary muscles that surge into action. Delicate self-controlling mechanisms make moment-to-moment adjustments to all parts of the body.

Most of these changes are triggered by a special network of nerves; the nerves of the sympathetic nervous system. Unlike the nerves that move our limbs, these nerves don't go straight from brain to muscle. Instead, they pass through "switch-boxes" - called ganglia. The switches are operated by chemicals that "jump the gap" between nerve and nerve. In this way, they pass on, re-distribute, or halt a message - much as trains are stopped or re-directed at a railway junction. The operation of these junction boxes has been carefully investigated - and this much has been discovered: -

At the end of the incoming nerve are many branches with swellings - like beads on a string. The swellings store a transmitter chemical. It's related to adrenaline, the booster of bodily function that everyone knows about. A message is passed down the incoming nerve, in response to some bodily need - perhaps to send blood out into the skin; perhaps to raise the pressure in a blood vessel; perhaps to pour digestive juices into the stomach. This is the signal for the discharge of the transmitter chemical. The sacs containing it burst out through the membranes at the end of the nerve. This shoots a packet of the chemical into the space between incoming and outgoing nerve. It jumps the gap between them and is recognised by receptor sites on the outgoing nerve. The nerve responds and passes on the message. This might result in the opening of a sweat gland to cool the skin, or in a deep yawn to aerate the lungs. Or it might release a chemical messenger into the blood to promote some activity, some bodily change, or even some change of mood that's necessary at that moment for the proper functioning of the body. The sympathetic nervous system sees to it all on our behalf.

Now sympathetic means "with feeling." These very sensitive body mechanisms are finely tuned in to our feelings and needs. They're part of God's intricate provision for the unconscious operation of our very complicated bodies. He has involved Himself in the most trivial of our needs - not only of body, but also of soul and spirit. When Jesus, God's Son, came to earth "He was not a high priest unable to sympathise with our weaknesses," the Bible says, "but one who, because of His likeness to us, had been tested in every way ... We may therefore boldly approach the throne where we can find timely help.” God cares for us when we’re unable to help ourselves. All that's needed is an urgent message along the "hot line" between us and Him.

225; Muscle; involuntary; automatic; sympathetic nervous system; ganglia; adrenaline; message; sympathy;

Where is Home?Nature Shows the Way - the way Cod guides His creatures home, fitting their bodies with ingenious navigational aids that keep them on the right road.

Homing pigeons excite wonder, through their ability to return quickly to their home loft from unknown destinations, hundreds of miles distant. The best pigeons can make it home in a day, from 600 miles away. Ancient armies employed them to carry messages home from the field. Beleaguered cities used them for communication. Pigeon post was established eight centuries ago, in Baghdad. And pigeons were used to carry despatches in both world wars. When a pigeon is released in strange surroundings, it circles rapidly upwards, gets its bearings, and then makes straight for home. How does it know where home is?

The full secret still remains with the bird. But science, ever curious to explore, has devised experiments to find some of the answers. Many of the first experiments were based on the sun-compass theory. The midday sun gives the bird a north-south bearing. To get its bearings from the sun at other times it must have a clock, for the sun moves across the sky daily - at the rate of 15 degrees an hour. By caging birds, and setting up an artificial sun - that didn't move - observers found that the birds did indeed measure time. They allowed for the sun's movement, and behaved just as though it was moving in an arc of 15 degrees an hour.

This is fine when the sun is shining. But it doesn't explain how pigeons find their way home under overcast skies. This brings us to the idea of a magnetic compass in birds - in addition to their sun compass. To test this idea, magnetic coils were fastened to the birds' heads. When they were switched on, in the direction to indicate home, the birds did indeed set off in the direction where home lay. But only in overcast weather. In sunny weather, experienced pigeons continued to use the sun compass.

But there's still another way to find home when the sun is hidden. Polarised light is able to penetrate cloud cover; and the polarised light pattern changes with the sun's position in the sky. It's known that bees steer by it. They have a special mechanism in their compound eyes to detect it. Birds don't have compound eyes; but it's thought that they, too, have some sort of polarised light detector.

Other parts of the direction-finding mystery also remain obscure. All the birds' direction-finding would serve no purpose if it didn't know the direction in which home lies. It needs some sort of a location map as well as a compass. Somewhere there must be a location sense that charts both home position and present situation.

Birds are wonderfully equipped. They have a sense world quite unknown to us. We, on our part, have a home unknown to them - and a sure means of finding our way there. God, our Father, is our true home; and Jesus, His Son, is the way to Him. Jesus said, "I go to prepare a place for you." He promised us everlasting life in the bosom of the Father. Today's world is a confusing place; and it's easy to get lost. But faith in God's Son will lead us home. He's our sun, the light that points the way. When the sun appears hidden, in a cloud of doubt, sorrow, or pain, all may seem lost again. Not so! There are other invisible forces to guide us through. When we trust Cod, His Spirit finds a home in our hearts - He'll point the way through the darkness. There's a dependable map of the way available to us, too. It's clearly set out in the Bible, God's own Word. It shows us where we stand - and where home lies. There's no need ever to feel lost.

226; Navigation; homing pigeon; Baghdad; pigeon post; polarised light; compound eyes; magnetic; compass; map;

Undercover AgentsNature Shows the Way the way God, with creative ingenuity, employs small invisible specks of life to complement, assist and protect larger animals and man himself.

Bacteria don't enjoy a good reputation with us. Ever since Pasteur and Koch showed that they were responsible for anthrax, tuberculosis, and typhoid, germs have been associated with disease; and the question has been how to destroy them. Now we're learning better. We're beginning to see them as valuable allies; and to look for ways of collaborating with them.

Germs are everywhere. Our own bodies harbour them, cultivate them, and depend on them. There are more of them on your body or mine than there are people on the face of the earth. Our skin fairly swarms with them; it's their home territory. They're scavengers, keeping the skin healthy, protecting us from infections and itches. Inside the body, our intestines are alive with them. They help us to digest our food, and they protect us from less welcome visitors. We breathe others into our lungs the day through. Germs surround us from birth to death. People who haven't their proper share of them are wide open to infection: they have no protection against disease. Indeed, we often pump germs into our bodies as vaccines, to confer immunity. They're our unrecognised defence force; and help us much more than we ever realise.

They're at work in the soil too - but in a different way. They recycle plant nutrients. A saltspoonful of soil contains an average two billion of them. They're soil chemists. Some specialise in the conversion of cheap nitrogen from the air to expensive nitrates for feeding plants. We've learnt to inoculate crops with these nodule bacteria in order to increase the yields of clovers and other legumes. Others recycle carbon. Plant leaves extract carbon dioxide from the air to build carbohydrates. Then soil bacteria feed carbon back again into the atmosphere from the dead leaf remains - all ready for re-use by the plants in another cycle of leaf growth.

But today bacterial chemistry isn't confined to the soil. Man himself is learning how to use bacterial skills in industry. Enzyme engineering is a very modern concept. Enzymes catalyse chemical reactions very easily and quickly. They can reduce lengthy and expensive chemical changes to mere seconds. Bacteria manufacture these handy agents of change - for their own use. But man is beginning to see the possibility of engaging them to manufacture medical and industrial products; to clean up oil spills; to biodegrade and recycle waste; to clean clothes; to manufacture fuels; even to extract metals from their ores. Bacteria are man's scavengers; his work agents; co-industrialists with him in the food and fuel industry; guardians of health.

Bacteria keep the great network of ecological change in balance. It's only when man, by his clumsy efforts, throws the web of life out of gear that we get pollution, disharmony, and disease. In God, everything is in balance. Our lives work harmoniously; we get on with one another - when we obey His laws. But there is the catch: man revels in independence - and disobedience. The result is imbalance, disharmony, sin, and despair. Yet God, in His love, has made provision for this also. He's an expert in repairing broken relationships. He sent His own Son for the very purpose of restoring our broken ties, and reconciling us with God and with man. He wants to put us again into harmony with our total environment - through the ecology of love. "Love looks for a way of being constructive" the Bible says. It heals every scar.

227; Bacteria; anthrax; Pasteur; Koch; germs; immunity; vaccine; soil; inoculate; legume; scavenger; catalyst; harmony; ecological balance;

The Light ResponseNature Shows the Way the way God brings power to earth from the sun above, and uses it, by way of some remarkable cell chemistry, to power the growth of living things.

Light and life are inseparable.

Life means the production of big carbon molecules. But this requires energy - energy from the sun. It comes in the form of fast moving photons of light. There seems to be only one means of capturing their power. The plant does it by converting light power into the movement of electrons, those ultra-microscopic particles that are locked into the orbits of the atom. The secret of how this is done has only recently been discovered by man. It's now used to produce currents of electrons at metal surfaces and p-n junctions, in light meters, photocells, and solar cells. But plants have used the idea for a long time. It's the Light Response we see every day when plants are bathed in sunlight - and begin to grow.

As light floods the earth with power, creatures respond to its life-giving touch: and in various ways. Green plants open their leaves in the pathway of the sun. Their power units, called chloroplasts, soak in the energy of light and build highly organised carbohydrates, out of simple molecules of water and carbon dioxide. Smaller one-celled plants, called algae, work differently. They have no leaves. So their first response is to move - towards the light: or, if it's too strong, to move away from it. Somewhere in the cell is a light receptor. When this becomes shaded, the cell moves to point it again towards the light. Rowing itself forward with a whiplike flagellum, it alters course constantly to bring it into the path of sunlight.

Smaller than the algae are the bacteria. Many of them also need light to live. Sulphur bacteria use it to split electrons from sulphur compounds and so gain power to build their own food. They, too, move towards the light.

But response to light goes beyond even the smallest cell. The tiny green power units within the cell itself take their own steps to reach the light they need so much. Parts of the cell become shaded, and this reduces food production. So the amount of light in different parts of the cell is measured. The chloroplasts somehow respond to this information and move, with the streaming protoplasm of the cell, to find just the right amount of illumination.

As plants respond to the light, they receive energy to live. The light that's harvested by the green pigments is used to work an "electron pump". This "pump" extracts electrons from their tightly-held state in water, and passes them on to a reaction centre. Here, their power is used to build the great carbon-rich molecules of life. This is cell chemistry on a grand scale - something no human laboratory has ever been able to imitate. It's the mechanism God has devised to produce life from light.

There's another type of light that floods the earth. It's "the light of the knowledge of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ." God sent His Son to earth to show us His own true nature - unconditional love for men. A few responded to this light of life. Most didn't - they killed God's Son on a Roman cross. "But to those who did receive Him," the Bible says, "He gave the right to become God's children." The same offer - of unconditional love - comes to us now. It's God's light shed into a self-seeking, frustrated world. But it must be received; accepted on trust. God never forces His love upon men. We have to move out towards Him, when we recognise the light - as the green algae are able to recognise their source of power and turn their faces to it. When we do accept this light, it produces the same result that light generates in a plant – the generation of power, the miracle of life itself.

228; Light; life; chloroplast; p-n junction; sulphur bacteria; electron pump; streaming protoplasm; electron;

Invisible AlliesNature Shows the Way - the way God as Creator has devised life in its entirety, so that the greatest helps the least, and the least assists the greatest.

If man himself is to be considered the greatest, then the least -in size, not in numbers - must be the one-celled things we call microbes. They were unknown a few generations ago, before the invention of the microscope. Even today, most people have never set eyes on one. Yet they're at the base of our life structure; we're quite dependent on them for our livelihood; they're our invisible allies in the fight to survive.

Who, or what, are these microbes?

Some of them are one-celled plants called algae. The larger algae, like seaweeds, are built of many similar cells. But the smaller ones, the microbial algae, lead an independent, one-celled existence. They're independent in a real sense because they contain chlorophyll, that green pigment that collects the sun's energy and powers our world. Algae use it to make energy-filled food molecules from lifeless minerals. So they stand at the foot of our food chain - in the plankton of sea, lake and stream. Much of their carefully stored energy is lost in the passage of food up - through shellfish and fish - to man. So there's talk of harvesting it directly to avoid this wastage, and feed a hungry world.

Then there are the microbial fungi. Again, the many-celled fungi are known to us, in mushrooms and moulds.But there are one-celled fungi like the yeasts that ferment sugar, and provide us with bread and wine. Other fungi are

agents of decay. Lacking chlorophyll, they can't build their own food, as algae can. So they take their place on the reverse side of the food-chain, decomposing worn-out plants and animals. Re-cycling their energy, they reduce them to leaf-mould; and, in doing so, rid us of the enormous piles of waste that would accumulate and make continued existence impossible. And, in this process of decay, they release again into the atmosphere the carbon, oxygen and nitrogen that would otherwise be forever locked up in the dead bodies of plants and animals.

As there are one-celled plants, there are also one-celled animals - protozoa. They differ from the algae and fungi in eating solid food. Their own private world is the world of the microscope. In that minute world, you might observe some of them attached to rocks or waterweeds in a stream - their beating rows of cilia carrying small particles into the mouth in a food-current; sifting the water around them for bacteria and algae. In the filter-beds of our waterworks, they attach themselves to the stones and earn a good living by extracting disease germs from our drinking water.

All these invisible allies, and many more besides, are working incessantly for us. They're everywhere - in soil, air, water; on us and within us. We never see them, and know little about them; yet they make life possible, even comfortable - by keeping everything in balance. This is how God - the Author of the small world as of the large - works: ceaselessly, invisibly, loving us and caring for us, even when we're unaware of His presence. God's ecology includes us - and them. Ecology is the science of providing homes. The home He has made for us is vast in its entirety and wonder. When we call Him Father, we learn to be conscious of His presence everywhere, daily providing for us, with ingenious mechanisms to make life on earth work. "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the earth shows us His handwork." From the vastness of the stars to the busy activity of the invisible world, God is at work for us.

229; Microbes; microscope; algae; seaweed; chlorophyll; food chain; fungi; yeast; plankton; decompose; protozoa; cilia; drinking water; ecology; home;

Seeing and KnowingNature Shows the Way - the way God as Creator opens up worlds of light to living things with those incredible devices that enable them to see

Eyes are the organs by which the mind looks out to see the world around it. They help us to know what's going on out there. When we have eyes, our minds don't have to work in the dark. With sight, the world isn't a prison to us. Eyes enable us both to see and to know.

Most small animals don't see much at all. Their only windows onto the outside world are eyespots - collections of pigment cells that detect light and darkness, nothing more. Tiny one-celled animals use them to measure the light, and to guide them towards it. An earthworm, with eyespots scattered over its body, can compare the intensity of light in one direction against that in another - and so know which way to move. For the rest, it must depend on its keen sense of touch and taste.

But most many-celled animals have something better than this. They add to the eyespot a lens of some sort. It focuses the light rays, and makes the eyespot into a sort of camera. In the nautilus, it's only a pinhole camera, with a tiny aperture through which the light enters. But in animals like the snail there's a lens instead of a pinhole. The eyes at the tips of its feelers bend the light rays, and focus them onto the pigment cells. The scallop has about a hundred of these simple eyes around the fringe of its shell. Instead of a lens they have thin crystals that act like a concave mirror to focus the light rays.

This brings us to the compound eye of the insect. They're closely packed bundles of eye-units: hundreds, even thousands, of them. They peer out from the sides of the head to pick up rays from every direction. Each tiny unit throws its own picture onto the sensitive screen behind, and builds up an ever-changing mosaic of the outside world. The smallest movement of a predator alters the mosaic, and enables the insect to escape.

Finally, in the mammals, we have an eye that suits man's well-developed, enquiring mind. We need to see things around us clearly and in detail. Our adjustable, lens-type eye - fully automated like the finest of modern cameras - suits us admirably. Its built-in light meter, and its automatic muscles, adjust the size of the aperture and the shape of the lens both for distance and for light - so than an image falling onto the sensitive screen is finely focused and clear. This sensitive screen is the most remarkable light detector. It has millions of receptor units; rods and cones - the rods for sensitivity; the cones for colour. They have their own private wires to the brain. Here a computer system that includes circuits for memory and association interprets what we see. It gives us a picture of distance and texture, of shape and colour, which has meaning for us, and is limited only by our own experience and understanding.

And, believe me, that experience and understanding is very limited. It includes only visible light; and the experience and understanding of a visible world. Out beyond the visible is the invisible world, perceived only by faith. God has made the same provision for our knowledge of that world as He has for our knowledge of the landscape we see every day. We can see and know God in the life of His Son. He came to earth to show us God as a loving Father - a father to whom we may be reconciled by faith in His Son. "Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father." Jesus said. But as pigment cells are receptive to the images focused on them, so we have to be receptive to the light - "the light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

230; Sight; eye; lend; nautilus; scallop; snail; compound eye; mosaic; rod; cone; focus; colour; memory; image; faith;

Knowing by TouchingNature shows the Way – the way God as Creator brings awareness to His creatures1 He gives them ingenious senses by which they hear, feel and see; and minds to interpret what they take in.

Man's two important senses often bear on the more distant scene. There’s usually a space between us and what we see or hear -a gap bridged by invisible light or sound waves. But touch is different. It deals with the close-at-hand things we can reach out to touch and feel. There's more familiarity in touch than in anything else.

Now there are various senses that work through feeling or touch. One or two of them belong to us. Most of them are the stock-in-trade of other animals, equipping them for life in soil, water and air.

To many water creatures, feeling is important. The catfish, groping about in murky water, has barbels that feel onto the bottom, enabling it to - find its way around. Lobsters and shrimps explore crevices with their long flexible antennae. Jellyfish and sea anemones wait with outstretched tentacles for the touch of some careless fish or crab. The slightest brush triggers their batteries of stinging cells: they shoot into action and transfix the prey. Other small water animals, living on the surface, use surface waves and ripples to locate their quarry. A struggling insect trapped in the surface film is quickly identified by a water-spider or a backswimmer, from tactile hairs that are set in motion by the ripples. And fish have a similar sense organ, the lateral line. If you look closely at a fish, you'll see a line of special scales along its side. They're pressure detectors. When something moves in the water out ahead, the water moves too. Just a thousandth of a millimetre of water movement is enough to set the sensory hairs beneath the scale in motion, send a message to the brain, and tell the fish there’s an enemy, a friend, or a mate - less than five body-lengths away.

In the darkness of the soil there are other creatures that depend on touch for their knowledge of what's around. The walls of an earthworm's tunnel press in on it on every side and convey the merest vibration to sensitive hair-cells in its skin. The ant-lion, waiting for a meal at the foot of its sandy crater, is alert for a sand-grain rolling down to it from some careless insect walking around the crater’s rim. It responds quickly with a shower of sand thrown out with its flattened head - enough to confuse the hapless insect and cause it to topple down the slope into the waiting jaws beneath.

In the air, too, touch is important. The flying locust monitors its flight with hair sensillae strategically placed on its head. They measure air-currents and relay messages to the flight muscles to keep the insect in straight and level flight. In the darkness of a beehive, the queen mother explores each empty brood cell before laying her egg in it. If her sensitive antennae indicate a small cell, a valve opens in her reproductive system to fertilise the egg she's laying - and a worker bee develops. If the message shows a larger cell, the egg remains unfertilised, and a drone is produced. Ants know one another by touch in the darkness of their nest.

Nothing brings one being closer to another than the understanding conveyed by a touch. When all else failed, God came close enough to men to touch them. From being a distant deity, he became a near Presence. In the person of His Son, He lived with men, and touched their lives. The gap between man and God was bridged. God in Jesus was able to reach out and touch the eyes of a blind man - to open them to His love. He could take a lame man by the hand and help him to walk. For the first time, God felt for the world through human senses - knew its need, and shared its pain. In the end He felt for men enough to die for them. So it was that in the darkness of the earth, men felt the warm presence of their God. It was only because he came close enough to touch the world with a human hand that we’re able to know Him as a Father and Saviour.

231; Touch; catfish; shrimp; jellyfish; lobster; anemone; tactile hair; backswimmer; water spider; earthworm; ant-lion; locust; sensillae; bee; presence; healing;

The Architecture of the Atom

Nature shows the Way - the way God, as Architect, planned the universe - with skill, beauty, and purpose. Much of this architecture is in things we don' t even see. It begins with the smallest of all structures, the atom. In the atom, the invisible forces of the earth take shape; matter and energy meet.

Men have always suspected that everything we know must be made up of tiny bits. But no one could have guessed at the complexity of design in these tiny "bits". The "bits" they thought had to be hard and unyielding, and all-of-a-piece. Rutherford and others found them to be as complex as life itself - tiny worlds with a structure all of their own. In the centre, indeed, is the hard "bit", the nucleus -more matter than energy. It gives the atom its mass and stability. Moving around it at high speed are the electrons - more energy than mass. They give the atom its power, initiative, and personality.

And atoms do have a personality of their own. There are about ninety different kinds, giving us the ninety or so elements. From those, all the substances we know - solids, liquids, and gases - are made. They're the building blocks of our world. Their ingenious architecture makes life, in all its variety, possible.

This variety and flexibility comes from bonding. Atoms are made to combine - each with each, or each with another - so that their properties and personalities blend, to produce new combinations. New substances emerge from the union of diverse elements. In the whirling world of the electron there are both inner and outer orbits. The inner shell of electrons clings close to the nucleus; but the outer shell looks abroad to seek new worlds. The outer electrons of different atoms meet, form bonds, and make still more complex structures - that we call molecules. The new molecule usually has greater resources than its constituent atoms. It has a combination of talents and possibilities that come from its different atoms.

And some molecules have thousands of atoms, arranged in imaginative designs, that provide new initiative for the varied requirements of life on earth. On the one hand, we have the simple atom of helium, with just one full shell of two electrons. It gives us a light and inert gas. On the other, we have the heavy, complex atom of uranium, with 92 electrons, in 7 orbits - giving us the radioactive and powerful molecules used in atomic reactors. On the one hand, we have the diffuse, widely spaced molecules of a gas. On the other, closely bonded into the crystal lattices of rocks and minerals, are the atoms and molecules of solids.

But the most complex of all are the life molecules. They're based on the carbon atom. Its four bonds reach out to build inter-locking rings and chains. They produce molecules so varied and flexible that they can build a body, like proteins; strengthen a tree-trunk, like cellulose; form jigs and templates for cell production chains, like enzymes; provide a vast dictionary of instructions for reproducing a plant or animal - and much more.

Life and living are forever tied up with bond building. Real living is divine architecture and design expressed in human terms. Men, like atoms, were never meant to stand alone. They have to be built into life structures. God, the Architect of life, has always intended us to function in close union with him - He, invisible power and love; we, the visible personality to express his design. The only bonds strong enough to work this wonder are the bonds of love. They not only unite us with God; but they bring us close to our fellow men. Each of us has qualities of our own. If we're prepared to lose our own separateness, we can forge an identity with God. We're no longer puny and ineffective, but part of a Divine plan - to build the body of Christ, and open up new potentialities we had never dreamed of. Human possibility is joined to divine omnipotence, in the bonds of love, to produce a new man in Christ Jesus. We are complete in Him.

Agents of ChangeNature Shows the Way – the way life fluctuates between the new and the old; between growth and decay – how materials from the old can be re-fashioned into the newly born; and life can begin all over again.

The agents that make this possible are the fungi. They thrive on decaying vegetable matter, recycling its elements so that they’re available for a new start - to begin something new. Without them, the earth would accumulate its debris, layer upon layer, and we would be swamped beneath old leaf-mould and dead tree-trunks. How do the fungi contrive to rid us of these?

First upon the scene are the "sugar fungi". They attack the sugar in plants. Now, fungi are plants without leaf-green; they can't build their own food materials. So the food elements left behind by the leaves of trees and dead grasses suit them admirably. Spores of sugar fungi are everywhere in the soil. The sugars left by dead plants stimulate them to germinate. Within hours, germ-tubes emerging from the spores grow out and over the dead leaf, feeding on its rich sugars, turning them into new growth. When the sugar supply is exhausted, another batch of spores is produced to start the next generation. The fungus then dies off, and leaves its feeding ground to others that can take the process of decay further.

Now come a group that specialises in cellulose, or wood - a much tougher proposition. But the "cellulose fungi" have their spores in the soil too, ready to begin growth when conditions are right. They're fungi of the penicillin type, secreting antibiotics ahead of its advancing threads to protect it from competitors.

What remains now of the dead leaf is a very resistant substance, called lignin. It’s not easy to recycle. But fungi of the mushroom class are equal to the task. They're always at work on lignin in the soil; and send out new threads to find new feeding grounds. These complete the work of decay. So each fungus group has its own part to play in ridding us of plant wastes - returning nutrients finally to the soil for new, fresh growth.

Besides leaf and tree-trunk, there are other wastes to be got rid of. There’s much undigested plant material in the dung of animals. And there's a group of fungi specially provided to deal with it. So special are these particular "sugar fungi" that their spore-bodies are shot out a clear two metres, by an explosive device. This throws them clear of the dung and onto the nearby grass. Here they remain dormant until a grazing animal swallows them. They're deposited with the animal's dung - all ready to germinate and to colonise new dung patches with their fungus threads. Others in the team, also specially adapted, follow behind them in close succession, to deal with cellulose and lignin - and reduce the dung heap to good grass fertiliser.

So fungi are agents of change. They rid us of the old, and make room for the new. The valuable elements locked up in outworn plants are made available for new growth. There's much in our own lives that's unused, yet valuable - gifts and talents that are lost beneath a burden of old habits and ways of thinking: wasted because they’re misdirected, and without purpose and power. There’s only one thing that can change this. The cross of Christ stands amongst the ruins of nations to proclaim a new way of life; and new hope for men. It's the way of giving, not

getting. The cross didn't end in death, but in a life of new quality and power. Jesus’ disciples became new men through it, with purpose and power in their lives. Like them, we can "rise up on our dead selves to higher things" - and make a fresh beginning. The cross shows God’s values in stark contrast with those of our world. It shows love in action, the only agent that's able to change our self-getting into self-giving, and free our spirits and personalities to serve others.

Dependent LivingNature Shows the Way - the way needs are made only to be met; and how living things with one mode of life depend on others with a very different mode of life, for their daily down-to-earth needs.Now, fungi are dependent plants. The first creative step of life - that of building carbohydrates from air and water – isn’t for them. They're lacking in leaf-green - the pigment that deflects solar rays and uses them for food-production. So fungi must depend on green plants for their life materials.

They do this by taking the carbohydrates of other plants, usually after these plants have finished with them. Tree and grass leaves are shed and fall to the ground as leaf mould. Insects and other animals die and leave their bits and pieces behind - a bank of energy for those that can use it.

And fungi can. They have ingenious methods of getting about, finding a food supply, and taking advantage of what's offering at the right time and in the right place. Their secret lies in spores - tiny one-celled reproductive units that float lightly on air, or are carried by water through forest and grassland, into ponds and lakes. They carry the fungus to the food materials it needs - then germinate to produce a mass of branching fungal threads. These feeding threads take possession of the rich supply; and when the food is exhausted they send up fruiting bodies, to liberate spores and begin the all over again.

Now these feeding threads and fruiting bodies take various forms. There’s the bread mould we all know. A microscopic spore falls from the air onto a piece of old bread. Fungus threads germinate from it; grow into the bread; and rob it of its nutritious carbohydrates. They then send up a fluffy mass of aerial fruiting bodies, which produce a cloud of spores at a touch - to sail on the wind and search out more bread.

Then there’s the potato fungus that robbed the Irish farmer of his main food crop, and brought the great potato famine of the 1840’s. Its spores hang in furry masses below the leaves. But the fungus threads grow down into stem and tuber, to invest their future in the food of the growing plant.

Fairy rings are common in the grass of meadows. They mark the outer rim of a large colony of fungus threads spreading out into the soil. The fungus threads have been feeding on the food left by decaying fragments of grass. The fairy ring itself consists of their fruiting bodies. We call them mushrooms.

But they’re only one amongst the many kinds of soil fungus. Another group supplement their plant diet with richer fare. The eelworms are common in most soils. Like a hunter with a snare of string or wire, the fungus sets a snare for the eelworm - by making loops in its own feeding threads. When the worm brushes against the inside of a loop, the fungal threads make short work of feeding on it.

Fungi are dependent living things. But so are we. We depend on plants to feed us. We depend on our fellow beings to help us live. Most of all, we depend on God for everything we have - especially for love. Man is flattered by the illusion of his own independence. But independent

living is an outworn fallacy - dispelled in science by the study of ecology; and in religion by the coming of Jesus. We can be bound within the prison of our own natures: committed to separate-ness. Jesus died to show us that we're part of a Father’s love; to reconcile us to Him. His love reaches out to draw us to Him and to make us members of the family of God, children of a Heavenly Father. We're bound to Him, and to our fellow men, by every tie of dependence and love. "I am come, " Jesus said, "that you might have life - life in all its fullness." Full living is inter-dependent living.

The Life-Giving StreamNature Shows the Way - the way substances from soil and air can be built up, molecule-upon molecule, into life-forms that grow, reproduce and interact - to make life as we know it. In this miracle of living, water plays a key part. Life needs water. It makes up 90% of the material bulk of life; and it performs life functions that no other medium could ever undertake. It’s equipped to do this by some very special properties.

One of these has to do with hydrogen bonding - the strong force that binds water molecules together. Each water molecule is very strongly attracted to its neighbour. It's this attractive force that causes water to make droplets, to "wet" things, and to climb up the walls of vessels inside plant stems - to the tops of the highest trees. Every plant stem or tree trunk is built to carry this life-giving stream. Set into its packed cells are bundles of vessels. They're long cells put end-to-end, strengthened and kept open by spiral thickenings, like springs, in their walls. The ends of the cells are perforated so that they make a system of pipes or conduits-right from root-hairs in the soil, where the water is taken in; through root and stem; out into the leaves through leaf-stalk and veins; to deliver their water, by evaporation, into the leaf spaces and into the air above. It's this refreshing stream of water that carries mineral salts from soil to leaf-kitchen; and keeps the plant alive.

But the sun’s heat that drives this amazing lift-pump could also dry the plant out. So the loss of moisture from the leaf-surface has to be carefully controlled. This is done by opening and closing ingenious vents - called stomata - on the lower surface of the leaf. They open to the outside air by two curved cells that guard the entrance. When there's plenty of moisture about, those "guard cells" take in water, swell, and open the door to the outside air. Water can then escape - and the water column is kept moving up the stem. When the air is dry, however, the guard cells collapse, close the stomatal opening - and water loss is reduced. The guard cells are sensitive to other influences too. Leaves must take in carbon dioxide from the air for food-making. If there's too little in the leaf, the guard cells open to admit more. Light, temperature and the amount of starch being manufactured in the leaf - all stir them to activity in one way or another. So the vital water balance of the plant is controlled in a very complex and sensitive manner.

It has to be! Plants need water. At every point in their climb upwards from soil to living plant, it's vital to the flow of life. Dormant, dry seeds imbibe it: it stimulates their enzymes to action, and starts growth. When they send out rootlets in search of moisture and food materials it's water that dissolves the soil minerals -it's water ascending the stem that carries these materials up to the leaves; and keeps the cells themselves turgid and alive. The living material of these cells - protoplasm - is itself a water loving colloid, a

laboratory of life.

So central is water to life that it’s been called the "water of life". Water is for thirsty plants and thirsty people. "Whoever is thirsty should come to me and drink," Jesus said. "I will give him living water." Life has much to offer - pleasure, wealth, power. Jesus offered none of these - only living water. By that He meant the Good News which He brought from God - of a Father who loves us as His children; who sent His Son to live for us, finally to die for us; and by that means to reconcile man with God, and man with man. Such news is water to a thirsty man. It refreshes him with new hope; gives new purpose and meaning to life. It’s life itself. "Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never be thirsty again," Jesus said. He already possesses all that is needful for life.

A Matter of LanguageNature Shows the Way - the way God lives in the world caring for all and loving all. It's not easy for man, living in his own image, to comprehend this. It's a matter of language, of communication.

In nature itself we see language at work in a thousand different ways - revealing identity, intention, or desire. It’s far removed from our own language of words. But it serves the purpose just as well.

First the language of identity. While animals often wish to conceal their presence, in order to escape danger, just as frequently they want to reveal it - to a mate, to an intruder on their territory; even to an assailant. Most birds, many fishes, and some four-legged animals have colour patches, to show others of the flock or herd where they are, and who they are. The colour patches often appear only when the animal moves - like the white tail of a rabbit or the wing patches of a bird. The female firefly has a different method of communication. She lights her lantern when night falls to make her presence known to her mate. And she flashes it with a regular pattern to reveal her identity - just as a bird has its own song, sung from its own song-perch, to demonstrate its presence and individuality.

Then there’s the matter of intention. A bird defending its territory is clad in "the robes of aggression" - to tell an intruder that it’s not welcome there. The English robin meeting a rival holds its head up to display its bright red breast - a warning to keep away. Many birds have striking bits of plumage that can be fluffed up on the instant - like the neck feathers of a ruff. The bird confronted must know how to interpret this signal. It can be a threat. If the animal threatened turns its weaponry away, or hides it instead of presenting it - like a bird turning its bill away from the attacker or a dog hiding its teeth – that’s a clear acknowledgement that it wants to avoid a quarrel. On the other hand the signal can be one of attraction or affection, the bright colours and attractive designs becoming a tapestry of love, spread out to attract a mate - like the splendour of a peacock's opened tail. A further signal may be an invitation to nest - like the nesting material held aloft, or highly stretched neck, when one crested grebe meets another in the mating dance.So animals have a complicated code of signals - uttered and understood without the help of previous experience - which makes their identity, their desires, their fears, and their intentions known to one another. They have inborn ways of responding to this language. It gives complete understanding between animals of a kind.

There's language, too, between God and man. But it’s harder to pick up than animal language. We don't usually see God for what He is and so we don't

see our fellow men for what they are either. It's a difficulty of identity. We misinterpret God's intentions towards us, thinking He's out to trip us up or harass us. God finds it hard indeed to get through to us. We try to make God in our own image. Some think of Him as a judge on a white throne; some as a puppeteer, manipulating men and events; some as “pie-in-the-sky”. God had to come and live amongst us to convince us of His real nature. He came in the person of His Son, and died for us on the Cross, to show how far love will go. That was language men could understand. And when we begin to comprehend a love that gives itself freely and unconditionally - accepting the worst in us, and giving the best - we can begin to enter into a new relationship with God and man. The language of love is clear and irresistible. It forgives all, forgets all - and conquers all.

Building to a New PlanNature Shows the Way - the way God provides for growth: not always growth in the old way. Sometimes very revolutionary growth, in a new way. There are animals - and men - who take these fresh options; and change their whole way of living. They trade in their old bodies for new ones that work in a different way and in a different world. This is how it happens.

A young starfish, hatched into seawater from an egg, grows and drifts in the rich surface waters. It's tiny, shaped like a human ear, has a right and left side, and rows itself along with cilia - hands of tiny hairs. But after some weeks of growing and wandering it alters its habits - and its shape - completely. It settles down to a secure life attached to a rock, becomes a circular disc with arms, and has tubefeet that cling. It’s a new animal, built to resist the surging waves and expert in opening shellfish - on which it now feeds.

A young mayfly, clinging beneath the stones of a running stream, has no wings - only six running legs on which it scurries out of sight when disturbed. It feeds on algae, tiny plants that grow on the surface of the stones; and as it feeds it grows and moults. Wing buds appear on its back and get longer. At last, on a sunny summer's day it climbs out of the water, and emerges from the split shell of its former existence into a gauzy-winged flying insect - to join with others of its kind in a mating festival, the mayfly dance.

A young frog, beginning life as a tadpole, lives in the murky water of a pond. It rows its plump body along with a tail, breathes from the water with gills, and nibbles the waterweeds. As it grows, new things happen. Leg-buds appear, then legs, and the tail is absorbed. The tadpole spends time at the surface, gulping air. Finally, it steps from the mud of the pond into the lush green grass - with large eyes to hunt insects, jumping legs to catch them, a fine green coat to match the grass, and lungs to breathe air. It's a new creature, ready for life on land.

But the masters of change are insects like butterflies. They begin life as tiny eggs; then grow as caterpillars, feeding for their lives on the home-plant, the one on which they were born. They

leave it fully grown, to seek out a sheltered spot for rest and

change. Then in an hour or two of re-creation, they emerge from a hard-skinned pupal cell, with wings to fly, eyes to spot flowers, and a sipping tongue to feed on their nectar.

How is all this done? It's the chromosomes in the cell nucleus,

with genes spaced out along their length that determine the plan on which an animal is built. They contain not only the plan, but also every detail for its construction - and reconstruction. It's thought that they hold alternative building plans. The old set of blueprints can be stowed away (genes can be switched off) and the new set

brought out (genes switched on) to build a new animal. Messenger molecules are despatched from the "switched-on" centres in various parts of the body. They result in the manufacture of new building blocks. Old organs break down; new ones take their place. Old things pass away; all things become new.

Such amazing transformations can occur in human lives. Man has a capacity for change. A man’s whole life can be re-oriented, so that a new outlook, new sets of behaviour, and a new purpose take possession of him. It can happen when he comes under new control; when a new message gets through to him. It's the message of God's love, brought by His own special messenger, His Son, whom He sent to earth to deliver the Good News - that God cares infinitely about each one of us. He has a building plan that He wants to put into operation in each of our lives. It will enable us to grow from self-centred, hungry, and immature people, intent only on getting, to giving and productive people - going out in love to others.

Spontaneous LivingNature Shows the Way - the way God directs animals, with their incredible instincts, through all the involved pathways of life. Only man has much say in the direction his life takes. For most other animals, life is spontaneous. They don’t learn as we do. They simply obey a voice within. It tells them what to do in every circumstance and detail of living.

The newly born herring gull chick gets its food by begging. It pecks at the tip of its parent’s bill. This prompts the gull to throw food from its crop and present it daintily to the chick. But experiments show that not any bill will do. The chick’s begging is turned on only by the right sign - a bill with a red patch on its lower tip.

Every bird parent returning to its nest is greeted by the stretched necks and open mouths of its hungry family. She’s stirred to feed them by right colour pattern of the open mouths. And the nestlings are stirred to beg by the movement of the twig on which the bird alights. I found myself spellbound just a day or two ago by the sight of a tiny grey warbler feeding a shining cuckoo fledgling - several times its size - and all because the hulking youngster had the right begging call to turn its foster mother on. It was enough to make her work every moment of the day collecting tiny insects to feed the impostor that stole her own nest and killed her own nestlings.

In the fish world, there's the same spontaneous reaction to sign language. Mating between two three-spined sticklebacks has to be done according to the inherited rules. The swollen abdomen of the female is the sign

for action. It sets the male off on a zigzag dance. The male’s rod belly (his new courtship dress), and his dance, "turn on" the female; and she swims directly towards him. This reaction is the next sign. It causes the male to turn rapidly and swim towards his nest. The female follows; the male points to the entrance; the female enters. This releases a quivering reaction on the male’s part - which induces

spawning and fertilisation. Each

stimulus, and its spontaneous response leads

the two another step along the unbroken behaviour chain

towards mating and egg-laying.

What triggers these instinctive reactions that help animals to do just the

right thing at the right time? Some influence - perhaps the

lengthening daylight - send a chemical messenger, a hormone, to a brain centre. The stickleback becomes conscious of a "drive" within. It migrates to shallow, fresh

water in search of a territory for breeding. Here it’s confronted with “signs” that release some chain of action- fighting, nestbuilding, mating, care of its young, all very complex forms of action, guided and stimulated by simple signs, like a red belly or a piece of nesting

material. Instinct isn’t the simple reflex reaction it was once thought to be. It’s an altogether purposeful and intelligent pattern planned for the care of an animal that can’t plan for itself. Its Author and Director can be none other than God, who loves and cares for all.

Man can live as spontaneously and purposefully as animals -because love is spontaneous, forgetting itself, and caring for others. This amazing quality of life that just obeys the impulse of love -instead of being involved, circuitous, and cunning in our relations with others - is available to every man. We learn it from God’s Son, who died to save us from our complicated selves, and to reconcile us to the Father. "Don't be careful and troubled about many things," Jesus said, "Just trust in God." This is the spontaneous living that animals enjoy. With us, however, it's not instinctive. It comes only when, by a specific effort of the will, we transfer faith from ourselves and our own efforts to a Heavenly Father, who is well able to care for us and for every detail of our complex living.

On Eagles’ Wings

Nature Shows the Way - the way to be free. No living thing is entirely free and unfettered. Every creature is bound in some way by its relationships with other living things. But an eagle in its eyrie, high in some mountain wilderness with a valley opening at its feet, is as free as any living thing can be.

It’s free in its command of the land. It has a vast living space - its nesting territory. A golden eagle and its mate in the Highlands of Scotland have a territory of about 10,000 acres. It's a hunting area that's patrolled daily in search of prey. Other eagles, even its own grown offspring, are warned off. The eagle has the freedom of the high mountains. It looks out from its eyrie in aquiline majesty, inexpressibly wild - and alone.

It’s free in its command of the air. Few birds fly with the ease and grace of an eagle. With a wingspan of six or seven feet, it can soar effortlessly through the air, to make itself a mere speck in the sky. There are updraughts along the mountain ridges -or, on a warm day, thermals in the valley below - that form rising columns of air. The bird can circle in these updraughts to gain height. Then, turning into a long glide, it gains speed while losing height - to turn again into another updraught and make height once more. All the while, its slotted wingtip feathers are spread out, gently fingering the air currents to maintain stability. So, soaring high, the eagle scouts its wide terrain.

With such an expansive territory to patrol, the eagle needs the best of vision, to sight its prey below. And an eagle does have acute long-distance sight. Its two eyes look directly ahead, combining their separate angles of vision for the

accurate judgement of distance. Like other birds of prey, eagles have globular eyes, deep from lens to retina, so that a larger-than-usual image is thrown onto the screen behind. This screen is a very finely grained light detector. The sensitive cone cells are set so closely together that they distinguish separate points of light from a very long distance. This gives the bird remarkable keenness of vision. When the light falls onto the fovea, with its million or so cones to a square millimetre, the eagle’s piercing eye can see eight times more acutely than our own. As it hurtles onto its prey beneath, in a swift dive, a double-focusing mechanism adjusts its eyes to the rapid motion; and the binocular vision gives it the range of its quarry. It makes its capture with pinpoint accuracy.

So this keen-eyed bird, with its effortless flight, soars free in the mountain heights. But with all its mastery of the air, the eagle is

borne aloft by no energy of its own, but by the strong forces of nature. Wind and sun are its native element, and both provide it with the power to fly. The warmth of the sun heats the ground and causes updraughts of air. The power of the wind provides lift. What the eagle has to do is set its powerful wings to the flow of the air, and control its flight with the carefully spread wing tips.

Man himself can soar on eagles wings - and reach heights he could only dream of attaining by his own efforts. "Those who trust in the Lord," the Bible says, “will find their strength renewed. They will rise on wings like eagles. They will run and not get weary; they will walk and not grow weak.” The wings on which we may soar are the wings of faith. The energy that enables man to rise above himself is the power of love. Both come from God. They're as unseen and as little known as the forces that sustain the eagle high in the air. We begin to experience them - and the freedom that comes with them - when we meet God’s Son. Faith in Him frees us from ourselves, and unites us with God. "In Christ Jesus, the life-giving law of the Spirit," Paul says, "has set you free from the law of sin and death." We become free to soar to God's heights - on eagle's wings.

Guided into Action

Our bodies are very complex machines - much more intricate than any computerised industrial plant. They need to be guided into action. Muscles make them move. But how are they directed into all the precise and perfectly co-ordinated movements that are so typical of life.

The key element in this directive process is the nerve cell, or neurone. It moves muscles to action, and directs them in what they do. And the brain uses billions of them. They're cells with inputs and outputs. Coming in are "Yes-no" signals from other neurones - thousands of them - some from a distance (perhaps from touch receptors in the skin; taste buds on the tongue; or stretch receptors in muscles). Or they may come from other neurones close-at-hand that have some sort of stored information - like memory or learning - or have just received new information from some other source.

Now, what the neurone does is to sum up all these incoming signals. It has a finely set trigger which "fires" it at a pre-set voltage - built up from these various inputs; or it may not fire at all - if that threshold isn’t reached. But when it does fire, it sends out a new sort of message - compounded from the variety of inputs, the result of a mass of information: all weighed up, coded, then sent out as a clear instruction to act. So the neurone is a gateway, letting signals through, altering them, holding them up by not firing, or delaying them by shunting them into circuitous pathways. It's a gateway to action.

But action isn’t a simple matter of saying "Go" or "Stop." All sorts of considerations are important in making a simple decision to move. If a weight is suddenly put into your hand, your nerve network has to decide how heavy it is, how many muscle fibres are needed to lift it, what to do with it, how your body balance is being affected by the change in weight distribution, what measures must be taken to compensate - and a dozen other things. Messages run this way and that - measuring muscle stretch from tiny stretch receptors set into each muscle; reporting back to tell how many new fibres have to be thrown into operation, how adjustments to balance and movement are progressing - and many more. A whole feedback system is plugged in, to give continuous guidance for even a simple movement.

But in other cases, there may not be time for all this reporting back. If you're hitting a fast tennis ball, you have to adjust quickly. So there's a feed-forward control action - we call it co-ordination. The self-correcting systems have to be thrown into operation along with the movement itself. It’s done by a simultaneous forward computation - fed into the system along with the instruction act. Or, if you ’re dealing with rapid eye-movements, you’ll need something faster still - a "dead-reckoning" system, computing and setting the eye positions ahead, so that the eye

jumps into a new focus immediately.

The incredible computer system of the mind is God’s provision for purposeful, intelligent action. Before it gives the signal for action, it takes everything we know into account in a moment of time. But life is full of unknown circumstances and considerations we can't foresee, and seldom understand. For these, we need a higher authority - One who can see the end from the beginning. We need altogether new terms of reference that concern others as well as ourselves. And we have them in God's Son, sent into our world by the Father, to show us how to love, and how to live beyond ourselves, in fellowship with God and man. "When anyone is united to Christ, " the Bible says, "there is a new world; the old order has gone, and a new order has already begun."

Chain of CommandNature Shows the Way - the way God provides for order and direction in our lives - through the recognition of priorities. Animals - and we ourselves - have alert senses. Through them, stimuli of all sorts assail our minds. Thousands of messages crowd in every moment, all clamouring for attention and action. Without priorities there would be chaos. The body wouldn't know which way to turn - or what to do.

But there’s clever provision for sorting out what's important. The process begins even at the lower echelons of command. And it’s done by a very efficient system of data processing.

Now, the eye receives signals on a grand scale. Its sensitive screen, the retina, contains about ten million light receptors. If messages from all of these were permitted to reach the mind, it would throw our vision into confusion. So there's a computer system -many layers of cells connected in different ways - in the eye itself. It sorts out messages that are of interest and importance to us -those that give contrast and define shape; those in the centre of the field of vision - and passes them on. Those on the edge of the field of vision are cancelled out. In the frog, moving points of light that indicate insects suitable for food are passed on. Still images aren't of interest to a frog; and they’re cancelled out -frogs don't respond to them. Thus, priorities begin to be recognised even at the outside perimeter of our awareness,

And this happens all along the line. The simpler routine responses of the body that don't need decision are "hard-wired" -built in from birth, unlearned, and automatic. Such things as limb movements in walking are dealt with by local sub-processors in the spinal column. Above them, at the base of the brain, are co-ordinating centres, - the next stage in command. They direct the activities of the local centres and keep them working together in unison. Walking, for instance, requires much more than just the movement of limbs. The whole balance of the body has to be maintained, as weight distribution alters - especially on uneven ground. Then, when movement becomes vigorous, heartbeat, breathing, and temperature control, all have to be stepped up. The lower stem of the brain looks after such "housekeeping" chores. Above it again, are other centres that take action further. They can mobilise the whole body to a state of attention if some emergency occurs, or if some urgent need arises - such as hunger, demanding food; or danger, calling for escape.

This brings us to high command, the cortex of the brain. Here we have a very involved network of connections and inter-communications that's forever encoding and decoding the huge mass of information supplied to it - both from the inside of the body, and from the outside world. It has access to enormous banks of memory and experience; and consults them, also, before deciding on goals, or making decisions.

So the chain of command moves on, consulting higher and higher levels of decision-making at each step. It enables us to cope with the very complex world around us. We might leave it at that; and be content to live our lives intelligently - in terms of what we can touch, and feel, and see. But if we believe that man is made in the image of God, then we must believe that there's an area of experience beyond the data-processing powers of the mind. When we begin to speak of love - the sort of love that God's Son brought into the world - we find ourselves on new ground, ignorant of how to proceed. We're in a different world - one dependent on faith, not on sight. High command moves on to God. If he isn't in the driver's seat, we can't live lives that are fully satisfying. But "You have everything when you have Christ," the Bible says. "You are complete in Him."

Seeing is believing

It's been said that "Seeing is believing". Well, is it? We see something out there. It looks real, perfectly and absolutely real - a tree, a sparrow, a flower. After all, we've seen it with our own eyes. But whatever is meant by "seeing"?

Seeing is a picture within the mind - it's not "something out there”. It's true that the object "out there" reflects light, and sends light rays to the eye. There they're focused onto the screen of the eye, called the retina. But there's no screen there as we know it - just millions of pigment cells. So how do we see?

Well, it's the result of a complex processing of light signals. The pigment cells change light waves into electrical pulses - and these electrical pulses travel to the brain, along nerves. They're coded to carry information about the thing we’re looking at - coded in two ways:

The first is place-coding. There are cone cells in the retina of the eye tuned into the colour, say, of the object we’re looking at - perhaps a blue flower that we’ve noticed by the wayside. They pick up these blue signals and send them to the brain - by private wire. It’s when these ”blue" wires are active that certain nerve-cells in the brain "fire" - and the mind says, "Yes, that's blue." But you could get the same impression, of blue, by just activating the right nerve cells - without ever seeing a blue object at all. And if you were a frog, a snake, or a cat, the flower you’re looking at wouldn't even seem blue. You see, the colour isn't in the flower - because the very same signal, in another nerve, connected to a differently placed nerve-cell, might give you, not a blue colour, but a particular note in some music you happen to be listening to. The blue colour is merely a particular location in the mind.

The second type of coding in nerves is time-coding. A message to the brain can be time-coded as well as place-coded - and this on the same nerve. It’s done by sending a certain number of pulses per second along the nerve. The mind understands this as another type of message. It indicates the magnitude of the sensation. What you feel or see depends on the location of the nerve cell that's firing at the same time. How much you feel depends on the number of signals a second nerve is feeding into the mind.

So the signals reach the mind, coded to carry these sorts of information. The information now has to be processed - for wider meaning; perhaps for action. It could be that we’ve wanted to find this particular flower for a long time or for a particular purpose. Perhaps it recalls a memory - of a wonderful scent, of a particular texture or some interesting form or associated experience. Somewhere in the mind all these qualities of the flower, fed in at one time or another by the various senses, have been

brought together - to make this flower just what it is to us. In this way, the mind is continually mapping or modelling the world -to make it the place it is to us personally. Is it a true picture of the world out there? or just a picture ~ built for ourselves in our own minds? How real, in fact, is it?

And are we to believe only in what we can touch, feel, and see. The Bible tells us "No". There are other more enduring worlds than those of sight and touch. There's the world of faith, that opens the door to God and his world. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God. It has to do with the enduring qualities of life - the love of God the Father that lives on forever; our life as part of his family: our security and hope in him. They're the things that stay with us and support us when the scenes of life change; perhaps when nothing else seems to matter. They're the real substance of life: things we can live by, and count on. "Nothing", the Bible says, "can separate us from the love of God which is ours in Christ Jesus.”

LANGUAGE IN COLOUR

There are many sorts of language - and animals have most of them sound, sight, scent - and many others. But for those with colour vision - and this doesn’t mean all animals - conspicuous signals in glowing colours are popular and effective. They’re God’s provision for communication without speech.

They’re much used by fishes in the sea - and important there, where murky water and recesses amongst rocks make sight difficult. Colour shows a fish up for what it is, and makes its presence known to others of the same species. Fishes that live in coral reefs might be said to match the bright colours of the coral itself. But there's more to it than that. The reef, with its varied habitats and its rich food supplies offers home and sustenance to a teeming population of fishes. There’s vigorous competition for feeding territories - so aggressive fishes have to be kept apart. Dress assists in this. It identifies a fish as it patrols its territory, warning others with the same tastes in food against "setting up shop" in the same street. In this way, quarrel and bloodshed are avoided. Colour language is effective in keeping the peace.

Sometimes the colour pattern is more than a warning poster. It’s a trade mark by which "those in the know" offer their services to likely clients. This is the case with the cleaner fishes - tiny gobies and wrasses that "earn their keep," and at the same time perform a useful service, by cleaning and grooming larger fishes. Their professional dress is a black stripe along the coloured side of the body. This trade sign, and a dancing seesaw motion that accompanies it, tell the larger host fish that the services of the cleaner are available. If the host fish, in turn, gives the right signal, the cleaner fish will approach it - unharmed - and remove parasites from its skin - even from the inside of its mouth. Bigger fish have been seen to queue-up for their services. But it would be strange indeed if impostors and "con-men" didn’t turn up -as they do in the human scene - to make capital out of' such immunity. There's a small sabre - toothed blenny that mimics the cleaner fish. It has the same trade sign, and the same seesaw dance. Using them with the same skill as the cleaner fish itself, it approaches the host fish, the more readily to tear bits of its fins away - as is its habit in obtaining food.

We don't, however, have to go to a coral reef to see colour language at work. It happens in our gardens and fields every day when plants hang out their coloured petals as signals to butterflies and bees. Each flower has its own special clients - and they understand its particular colour language. Blue and yellow colours are popular with insects. They say plainly, "Nectar is here. Come and take some. But you’re expected to carry pollen for us at the same time." Red is more popular with birds. The humming birds - those important little cross-pollinators of the tropics - are attracted to flaming red flowers where they sip nectar.

So colour is a language, with meaning for those who under-stand it. The meaning is encoded in the wavelength of the light. White light is made up of a variety of wavelengths, each capable of producing a colour. But, to do that, they have to be reflected to our eyes. It's this reflected light that gives the plant or animal its colour - and its message. We share these messages with them - for colour speaks to us. But for us there’s another sort of message in light - for the Bible says that "God Himself is light." He illuminates our darkness with the rich colours of his love; He speaks to us in the language of love. It brings warmth and cheer to our world. But like white-light it's visible only when it's reflected from human lives. Jesus, God's Son, reflecting His Father's nature, showed us love at its richest and best. "He is the very image of the invisible God," Paul says. He reflects all the colours of God's love.

Living defensively

The world can be a hostile place to live in. It would appear that crabs found it so - for they erect barriers against it. A crab's wall to separate it from death and destruction is its hard casing. It lives inside a shell - known as its exoskeleton, because it’s a skeleton outside the body.

This exoskeleton is a coat-of-mail, hinged at the joints and as tough as leather. It covers the whole body - legs, jaws, feelers, eyes. And there’s a specially thick and rugged carapace to protect the upper surface of the body. This carapace itself is a many-layered shield. On the outside there's a thin, tough layer which protects the crab from abrasion by sand and rock. It also contains fatty materials which make it waterproof, and so keep the gill-chambers beneath it moist when the crab is on land. Beneath this again is a thicker layer, built up of hundreds of strata, all arranged in different directions for strength, and impregnated with lime to give hardness. It takes the place of our own bony skeleton -for the strong leg and jaw muscles are all set into it, to give them purchase as they pull legs and jaws this way and that. So, protected from both injury and drying, crabs are able to do what most sea-animals can’t - venture out onto dry land

And there, on land, they're confronted with; a very hostile environment - it may be that of the shoreline between tides, where they’re covered at one time by water and exposed at another to the drying effects of sun and wind; it may be that of an estuarine mudflat, where they’re bathed in fresh water at one moment and salt water at another; it may even be high up on dry land if they’re land crabs or climbing crabs. Here they have to breathe air -a difficult matter for a sea-animal provided with gills. But the friendly, protective carapace, bent down over the sides of the body, forms an enclosed chamber for the gills - keeping them moist, so that oxygen can be dissolved and breathed in from the air. As an added protection from the heat of the sun, many crabs shelter below stones, or in rock crevices. But some burrow in mud; others in sand. The sand-burrower backs down into the flowing sand grains allowing them to close-around it; and breathing meanwhile through a tube made by pressing its two long antennae together.

Perhaps it’s little wonder, then, that crabs out of water are unfriendly creatures. Unlike some insect societies - those of ants, termites, bees, and wasps - crab society is competitive, not co-operative. It’s a case of "every man for himself". Crabs are nothing if not individualistic. Each has its own territory - a bit of land around its tunnel - say on a mud flat. It defends it vigorously - at first by threats and signals, waving its huge claws menacingly, then, if this fails, by fighting - again with its armoured claws, one of which may well be lost in battle. In the crab world the battle goes to the biggest and strongest.

In human society it's common to find men behaving in the same way. We build protective shells around us as we grow up; and we become less than open with one another as we leave childhood behind us. We find we want to protect ourselves, in case we get hurt -and so erect barriers of mistrust and fear. We're living defensively - like a crab in its shell, its tunnel, its rock crevice, or its territory. It's no way to live! God made us for living and for sharing. He showed us how to live by sending his own Son from high heaven to share fully in the life of man. He exposed himself to the limit - finally dying for us on a cross. Yet through it all He was secure in the knowledge of a Father's love and He ventured all on the faithfulness of that love. "Don't be afraid, little flock," He told his followers, "for your Father has chosen to give you the Kingdom."

Finding our Niche

The secret of happiness is to find your niche in life. There’s a place for everything - and for everyone - in our world. Nature shows how God - in supreme concern for all living things - not only provides a niche for each, but also equips each, separately, with the ingenious adaptations it needs to match its particular environment and its special way of life.

Crabs, like men, live here, there and everywhere. But they have to discover their own home. They're not provided for by their parents. The female crab carries her eggs about, below her tail, until they hatch. Then the larvae are released into open water -to take their chances at survival. They’re shrimp-like creatures, born into a beneficent nursery - the sunlit surface waters of the sea. Here they take their place amongst other plankton animals -predators to some; prey to others. Warmed by the sunlight, and with a bountiful supply of food, those that survive grow rapidly. As they grow they moult - and change. Not only do they grow and change - they travel. Carried by surface currents (it may be a long way from their place of birth) they reach a new home - and a new way of life. And by that time each larva has grown, through several intermediate stages, to become an adult crab, with an armoury of form and habit specially suited to its new world.

This new world might be a rock pool, covered and uncovered by the tide. And the crab that settles here might be a spider crab -long-legged, slow in movement, with a habit of lurking, unseen, waiting in hiding for its prey to approach. It can do this because it has an instinct for camouflage. Its body is covered with hooked hairs; and the crab fastens bits of seaweed to these to become a walking garden, invisible amongst the waving plant fronds.

A hermit crab settles down to a different existence again. It borrows an empty shell, that of a univalve, for its protection. It has to for only the front part of its body is armoured, covered by the hard exoskeleton. So it must find a shell just the size for its tender body, tuck its soft abdomen into it, attach it with hooks, and scurry around with its borrowed home on its back - that is, until it grows a size larger; then it has to find the next size in empty shells - and make a quick change. A hermit crab's niche in life is its borrowed shell. With this to protect it, it can even step out onto land, sometimes climb trees in search of food.

But the hermit crab has a relative that’s a much more expert climber. It's the huge coconut crab that scales lofty palm trees. It needs no borrowed shell, for its back is covered with shelly plates that grow into place, to protect it from sun and wind. Like other crabs that live in exposed situations, its coat-of-mail covers the entire body, legs and all, so that it presents a formidable front to the world, with powerful armoured claws and strong walking legs. Much in contrast with no armoury at all - and no

need for it - is the midget pea-crab that you will sometimes find when you open a mussel shell. It lives its life out in the mantle cavity of its accommodating host.

So each crab, like every other animal - and man himself - has its own niche in life. The fact is that we’ve been built to a divinely conceived pattern and purpose. And we can understand this pattern and purpose only when we meet its Author, and entrust our lives to him. The crab larva has to travel a long way, in a high-risk adventure in the open seas, to find its home and its real identity. It has to change its way of life and develop altogether new equipment if it’s to grow successfully into capable adulthood. We, too, have to discover our true home and our real identity. We're meant to be children of a Father God. When we find our father -indeed, when His searching love finds us - He'll give us room to live fully and completely. He’s provided us with the means and ability to do this. We'll discover ourselves and our life pattern in Him

The Independent Self

In the Western world, the independence of the individual is held to be sacred. "A man's home is his castle." Any outside interference is resented. We like to run our lives in our own way. In the plant and animal world it's much the same. But there are some - whether plant or animal - that find they can do better for themselves by welcoming outsiders into the private parlour of their lives.

The habit begins with plants. If you sow a lawn, you'll find it invaded, often enough, with white clover. It’s a very vigorous and successful plant. And much of its success comes from the bacterial nodules on its roots. The nodules are the homes of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which the plant welcomes into its economy. They have the unique ability to take nitrogen from the air and make it available to the growing plant - as nitrates.

Lichens, those very hardy pioneers that find a home on bare rock surfaces, manage to eke out a livelihood in these very inhospitable places - but only because they’re hosts to food-making green algae. The fungus threads that make up the familiar crusty growths are packed with millions of algal cells. They contribute something to the plant partnership that the non-green fungus can't. They use the sunlight beating down on the rock surface to power the manufacture of carbohydrates from the carbon dioxide in the air. The fungus threads, on their part, provide shelter for the algae and keep them alive by the absorption of life-giving moisture from the air. Together, the two very dissimilar plants form a good working team.

But green algae make their services available to animals also. There's a little creature called a hydra that lives in streams and ponds attached to stones and waterweeds. Like other animals, and like the fungal fronds of the lichen, it’s unable by itself to make use of the carbon dioxide supply of air and water. But green algae can. So the hydra welcomes algal cells into its body. They live in comfort amongst the hydra's digestive cells. Here they trap sunlight filtering through the water, and use it to manufacture an easily digested sugar that makes a useful supplement to the hydra's own animal diet. The hydra, on its part, supplies useful materials to its tiny guests.

There are many other animals that aren't averse to using the unique abilities of algae and bacteria to their advantage. Many insects harbour bacteria, fungi, and yeasts to supply them with vitamins, enzymes, and sugars. They even employ intricate devices to transfer their desirable guests from one generation to the next, smearing them onto their eggs as they pass through the egg-laying apparatus.

Animals - and we ourselves - live within a closed energy system. We can't replenish our life energy without recourse to out-side help. Green plants

are agents of light and life to us. They keep our bodies alive and well. That's good, but not enough. We have to cope also with the closed energy system of the spirit. We become conscious of its stifling effect when we find the dead weight of sin and self pressing in upon us. We realise that the independent self is a fantasy that we can't afford. We need power beyond ourselves.

Some regard the presence of God in their lives as an unnecessary intrusion, interfering with their own freedom of action. Quite the reverse. God never enters our lives uninvited. But when He is invited as a guest, He brings a power that's lacking in human self -the power of caring love. He frees us from the closed system of self, and lifts us above ourselves and our own futile efforts. He sent His Son to earth to "proclaim liberty to the captives," and to herald "the opening of the prison to those who are bound." He frees us from the tyranny of self. Its closed system opens to the touch of divine

Energy in an atoll

One of the things about life is that it gathers energy. Other systems waste it and lose it. There's no better place to look for this accumulation of energy than in a coral reef. Here energy is poured into a thousand channels, in the activities of the very varied life forms that inhabit the reef.

Who can describe the gaiety of the coral world? It’s a domain of sunshine and colour. The sunlight penetrates the clear water, giving energy first to the plants. As a river descends from mountain to sea, surrendering energy as it goes to power stations on the way, so this power is passed down the line of reef plants and fishes. The power units are the living things of the reef. The energy that's passed on is life-energy. The line that it moves along is the food chain from plants to man.

The home base for all this interchange of energy is the reef coral. In itself, it's a solar panel. For living within the coral polyps are tiny plants - algae. They act as solar cells, absorbing the sunlight and using it to manufacture food substances for the coral. But the coral animals have a further source of food. Living in cups on their tree of lime, they stretch tentacles armed with stinging cells out into the water and capture small plankton animals. These animals themselves have received energy from the plankton plants they feed on. From these small beginnings, the food chain of the reef enlarges into a net, drawing in every plant and animal, from smallest to greatest.

Another base-plant of the food pyramid is the blue-green algal mass that covers the surface of the coral. In its meadows, sea urchins and surgeon fish graze. In the sandy flats behind the reef there may be other meadows - of sea-grass - where turtles and parrot fish browse. Lime-encrusted seaweeds are other base plants that add their store of food-energy, and from them trunk fish, with powerful jaws to crush the 1imy mass, earn their livelihood.

Other little-known components of the food chain are the filter feeders. Instead of grazing, they cast out nets to trap the swarms of tiny creatures that proliferate in the warm waters. Barnacles open up their crusty shells to rake in small fare with a dragnet of bristly legs. Tubeworms hold out crowns of' tentacles to enmesh suspended food as it drifts past. Sponges circulate water through a network of pores, and extract food particles. Shellfish - the giant clam among them - open their siphons to draw in a stream of' water over the filter-bed of the gills. Altogether, the primary production of the reef adds up to the best that good agricultural land could offer.

Yet these are just the beginning. Jellyfish and sea anemones harpoon small animals with their tiny triggered guns. Starfish open bivalve shells

to feed on the delicacies within. Energy is passed further along the line by the brightly-coloured reef fishes that search nooks and crannies in the coral for prey. Roving bands of carnivores then feed on these - only to be themselves overtaken by sharks - or by men.

Energy is best employed when it imparts life. It must be constantly traded to be useful; and one life must grow at the expense of another. This is a rule of life, made clear in the swarming, beautiful creatures of the reef. God brought the principle to life for all time when He gave His Son to spend His life for us and die on the Cross. The power of His death has stretched down the centuries to us here. We can be part of the energy chain of God if we believe this. The energy that He trades is love-energy. It's the most compulsive power of earth - or of heaven. When it's expended in self-forgetfulness - it can paint the earth with hope that ’s brighter than all the colours of the reef. But to gather its glow, you have to stand at the foot of the Cross. "For God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not die but have life.”

Where do you belong?

One of the things that nature shows us clearly is that there’s a home on earth for everything and everyone; for the most varied personalities - plant, animal, and man - with the strangest habits and ways of life. We find them all on the coral reef. There’s a place for each one. Each belongs somewhere.

Coral has a teeming population of animals - supported from the vast primary production of the warm, sunlit waters. Algae - tiny plants found both in the coral polyps and in the water around them -provide food and energy. The coral mass, with its cracks and crevices, provides the homes - all the odd spots in which a great variety of animals, with their peculiar needs and their varied equipment for living, can find sustenance and shelter.

If you were to crack open a bit of branching coral, you might expose a whole selection of small animals, each living in its own special way. There could be a sea urchin sheltering in a crevice, awaiting the security of darkness to provide cover for its nocturnal grazing. You might find small crabs of various habit feeding on worms and snails between branches. Pistol shrimps may be there to shoot at small prey with a well-directed jet from their pistol-like claws. There will be colourful sea slugs feeding on the coral polyps; barnacles and tubeworms throwing out their nets, with raking legs or feathery tentacles, to gather in small creatures from the plankton; or a hole made by a boring clam in the limy skeleton to sieve plankton in its own way - by taking it through siphons and filtering it in the gills.

Caves, too, in the coral provide their own opportunities for those that can live in darkness. Light and water enter from one side so you find a succession of clinging creatures on the walls, from algae seeking light at the entrance to encrusting sponges that don’t need it in the further recesses; while large spiny lobsters and moray eels lurk, ready to make forays for feed when opportunity occurs. Each of those - and many more - has its own special equipment to match its particular way of life.

For those that don't like the hard coral, there's the soft sand around the reef. Here, you have to make your own shelter by burrowing in the sand. The jawfish constructs a tunnel from masonry of coral and shell. But the sand grains keep falling in -and this is where its large jaws help, in carrying them out. There's a pistol shrimp that makes its cave by carrying loads of sand from it, making a shovel with the two large claws held out in front of the head. The spotted blue goby makes use of its special talents by sharing the burrow with it.

This is not the end of coral homes and territories. Butterfly fish have a bright livery of colours and stripes, different in each species, that help them to mark off their own feeding grounds about the coral. They have disc-like bodies that fit into the crevices in the coral, ribbon like undulating fins for hovering in these tight spots, and delicate jaws to pick off small animals from the coral branches. They're just a few of the varied species, specially built to occupy niches - from lowest coral to highest mountain.

There’s a place in life for each of us too. It was made for us - and we for it - by the Architect of all life. It's where we truly belong. We'll find it - and all the fulfilment that comes with it - when we find Jesus, God's Son. He Himself came to earth, sent by the Father, to fill a very special role - that of showing us the face of the Father, and of reconciling us to Him. In Him, we’ll find our own true role, and the best that life has to offer -a place in the Father's Kingdom, a job to do, a real part to play that suits our talents and abilities: a home where we're really ourselves. "You didn't choose me,” Jesus said, “I chose you, and appointed you" - to a job in life, “to bear fruit.” Paul travelling to Damascus on his chosen task found he was on the wrong road. Jesus met him and turned him clear around. At last he had found where he belonged. His life achieved meaning. He bore fruit.

The Search for Light

We look for meaning in life. We want to know what it’s all about. We welcome simple explanations of how it works, and where it’s taking us. Plato, the great Greek teacher, said we’re all like prisoners in a cave, not able to see, for the darkness that envelops us. He wanted to discover the reality beyond, the light outside the cave.

The early astronomers looked to the stars for this light. Their experience of day and night, the seasons, and the tides made them sense an orderliness and regularity in life. And this regularity they attributed to the movement of the stars. They thought of them as set in crystal spheres, which held them in place and took them around the earth clockwise, in solemn procession. But Copernicus had a much simpler explanation. It was that the earth itself moved, giving us, on earth, the illusion of sun and stars in motion. With such new understandings, men were beginning to see the light outside the cave.

But the question remained: what makes the earth and the planets move at all - what keeps them moving? What, indeed, holds them all in place up there - if not those crystal spheres? Newton's famous laws of motion and gravitation provided the answer to these problems. Not only did they explain all that was necessary to hold the heavenly bodies in orbit; they provided men with the means of predicting also the movements and positions of all things, not only in the sky, but here on earth too. It seemed that God had designed a superb mechanism; set the whole thing moving; and then left natural law to keep it all in operation.

In the meantime, the early chemists, not content with the heavens, were experimenting with the everyday things of earth. They discovered the simple substances - called elements - from which the earth and all that's in it is made. They found these elements, in turn, to be made up of atoms and molecules - simple, invisible building blocks that could be combined according to regular laws, to make all the various substances we know. The atoms themselves seemed to be hard, gritty, stable, all-of-a-piece; neither to be created nor destroyed - the permanent constituents of life.

It was then that science discovered energy - and the simple laws of thermodynamics that governed energy, much in the same way as the laws of motion governed mass. Energy though indestructible like matter could be traded in various forms, much as atoms were traded. Light proved to be the form in which energy came to us; heat the form in which we lost it. Electricity and magnetism were other sorts of' energy - often in the form of electro-magnetic waves that filled empty space, in what Faraday called the electro-magnetic “field”. We hear them now as radio waves and see them as light. Even the hard indestructible atom turned out, in the end, to be an energy system -alive with power, and in constant

motion.

Matter! Energy! The two concepts by which man explains his world. The barriers between the two are fast disappearing - as forces fill empty space, and atoms themselves produce energy; to give heat and light to our world. There seems to be an energy principle in everything we touch, and feel, and see - in the star and in the molecule. Man needs this energy principle himself. And he finds it in God - because God is love. He sheds His love into this world of ours, as the sun sheds its light. It’s no longer sufficient to conceive our world in terms of matter. If we want to live fully, we have to escape materialism - as science escaped mechanism. We need to know the power of love. Love is God's energy, brought to life in man. It’s the simplest and best thing that life has to offer. It changes matter to spirit; and gives true meaning to life - the meaning, understanding, and power that God's Son brought into the world, when He died to reconcile us to God and to man. He only is the light outside our cave.

Spheres of Influence

Nobody knows what influences surround us every day. We can tune-in to most of them if we try. Some go to materialism; and earn wealth and comfort. Some tune in to political doctrine; some to spiritualism; some to God - some just to the radio or television set. All around us are waves, fields of force, and other unseen influences that we know little about. Everywhere there's energy for the taking.

One of the strangest influences known to early man was electrostatics. You could rub a piece of amber with wool, and find that it attracted things. Another was magnetism. An iron-bearing rock-lodestone was prized for its help in navigation because, when floated, it turned towards the north. It could be used to magnetise a strip of iron so that it formed a north-seeking compass needle.

Most people at this time thought - and perhaps most also now think - that there's an attractive force between the compass and the distant North Pole; and that the needle would move towards the North Pole if it could. But one man thought differently. He'd noticed that the north-seeking tip of the needle also dipped slightly towards the centre of the earth. So he mounted it to swing vertically - and used it to measure dip and latitude instead of compass direction. But he did more. Piercing a cork with the magnetised needle, and carefully whittling the cork, he managed to suspend the needle beneath the surface, in a bowl of water. Now it was free to move where it chose. It didn't move towards the North Pole; and it didn't move towards the centre of the earth. Instead, it swung on its axis to take up a position pointing between the two. He, and others, took this to mean that there were invisible lines of force around the earth - and round the needle itself - and that it was these forces close at hand which interacted to move the needle. A new concept began to grow - that of the "field." It replaced the idea of the North Pole as a point source of attraction with the understanding of a “sphere of influence” surrounding all the earth -and objects on it.

This sphere of influence or "field" idea has become an important part of today's science - and of modern living. There are gravitational fields, electric fields, magnetic fields, electromagnetic fields. Electricity has been found to be a constituent of matter itself. The mysterious forces surrounding rubbed amber have given way to current electricity flowing in a wire. They move the wheels of industry for us - because a current flowing in a wire produces its own magnetic field. This magnetic field can turn the armature of a motor - just as it once turned a magnetised needle in a bowl of water. Electro-magnetic waves have also been discovered; and now we find electric and magnetic waves chasing one another across space -as radio and television messages. They’ve revolutionised communication. The very atom itself has been found to be a sphere of

electrical influence. Its orbiting electrons are the charged particles that leap their bounds to generate light waves and power our earth. Things are never what they seem. There are unseen forces -spheres of influence - everywhere about us.

We all have our own spheres of influence. They're part of our life with others. Materialism isn't the end of life as matter wasn't the end of science. Unseen forces - invisible energy - play as large a part as the things we see and think we know so well. Science has opened up electric and magnetic fields to us. Faith in God will open up much wider fields - God's sphere of influence reaches further. It's all around us - and in us. God wasn't content to remain distant, a point of influence to which we might aspire. He came, in the person of His Son, to live beside us. If we believe in Him we'll find Him still here, a living Presence, shedding love's energy upon us. Through the medium of love, He communicates with us, and gives us power to live that far surpasses the influence of electric and magnetic waves tripping to us through space.

Bird BalletBallet is an activity of man - and of birds. With us, it's a stylised dance. It has a musical accompaniment; a stage setting and costuming; and an audience. It's a form of language or expression. It tells a story. With birds, it's all of these - and a lot more.

Now, an important part of ballet is its staging, and costuming. Birds have their stage-settings; and, in costuming, many of them are experts. The widow birds of the African savannahs clear a special stage for their performances. For the Paradise widowbird it's a circle of carefully cleared ground, with a tuft of grass in the centre. The male performer wears a striking costume, in which red and orange breast feathers contrast with black head and back. Arching in an elegant sweep from the back are two gorgeous tail feathers. He shows these off to an audience of admiring hens by dancing around the class tuft; leaping high, prancing, strutting, and capering.

On the African plains, too, is the Great Bustard, an ostrich-like bird that transforms his very ordinary brown plumage into a white ballet dress, by rumpling up his feathers and spreading them to display their white undersides. Then, inflating air-pouches in his throat and erecting handsome whisker-tufts, he struts, postures, bows, and pivots in a ritual courtship dance. An even more impressive show comes from the African ostrich himself. Standing seven or eight feet high, he treats the admiring hen to a performance of male acrobatic pirouetting and spinning at a dizzying speed, to display the wonderful ostrich plumes once so popular in ladies' hats.

Bird ballet isn’t always done on an unfurnished stage. Bowerbirds add a great variety of "props." They embellish their theatres with hut-like arbours and decorations of flowers, berries, moss and pebbles, all tastefully arranged, and even painted with pigments crushed from berries. Others add avenues of sticks; and some construct "maypoles" with a central column of twigs, thatched with a sloping roof.

But, staging and scenery aside, it's elegant movement that makes ballet. You can see the original rendering of Swan Lake if you watch Trumpeter swans in courtship display. The two pure white birds face each other on the water, necks curved gracefully, wings half-raised. Then they circle, heads bowed in a tender salute. With still more grace and dignity, stately cranes enter their courtship ceremony. In powder-puff head-dress, they move in studied rhythm; bow, leap, and point their heads skywards, in a dance ritual that speaks more eloquently than words. But the last word in water ballet may be the dance of the crested grebe. The two partners face, each with a piece of waterweed held symbolically aloft; pause; leap upright in the lake, and "walk on water," side-by-side, to race across the surface in a dizzying aquadance.

For us, the ballet is an entertainment, an end in itself. For birds, it's a step on the way to mating, nesting, and the hard, exciting work of brood raising. It's a plan worked out by God to bring partners to a contract of love and family commitment. God’s mind is everywhere at work, interpreted in the complexities of innate behaviour. Instinct urges birds into the busy activities and rituals of reproduction. Birds are, as it were, programmed for the works of love - for self-sacrificing activity on behalf of their brood. Such love can be a feature of human personality too - but not as a programme of innate behaviour. It's expressed in the idea of God's family - accepted or rejected by man. God is Father; men are brothers and sisters in Him. This understanding can begin only with a reconciliation first of man and God. He sent His Son to earth to effect this great reconstruction - by dying for us on the Cross. "God, through Christ, changed us from enemies into friends” the Bible says "and gave us the task of making others His friends also."

Life’s Rendezvous

It's important to be in the right place at the right time - when person meets person; when opportunity knocks at the door. Life’s rendezvous can make all the difference between success and failure, between destiny and disaster. The Architect of the Earth has designed the instincts of animals to bring partners together in time and space; and so safeguard life itself.

Birds have their rendezvous; and some travel thousands of miles to keep them. You'll find migrants converging on a small island or a traditional nesting site at the same time each year - often to meet the same nesting partners that they knew a year before. For an emperor penguin, the rendezvous may be a patch of bare ice in the Antarctic winter. For a muttonbird, travelling the oceans, it may be the very burrow it was born in, on a small island to the south of New Zealand. For a godwit, feeding on estuaries of the South Pacific, it may be a Siberian steppe at the other end of the world.

When two birds meet to breed, they must be in compatible stages of development. Their currents of behaviour must flow in parallel channels, and meet at the same point. This means preparation months before. The bird's biological clock is a timing mechanism, which measures the changing daylight, sparks off changes in the gonads, and brings a restless urge to migrate. At the same time, the bird's breeding dress must be laid on the production line, to be ready for nuptials in spring. Navigational instincts - which mean reading the messages of sun and stars, and making accurate estimations of time on the bird's inbuilt chronometer - take the birds unerringly to their own special breeding homes. Here, other instincts - of song, display, and courtship ceremony - bring them to a compatible state, in which they're prepared to combine forces in the arduous task of raising a family. All these separate elements of behaviour have been finely synchronised to make a rendezvous in time and space -for the procreation of new life.

In the breeding cycle itself, there are other synchronizations -and some of them are the mutual understandings that come from language and bring - and keep - birds together. The New Zealand saddleback lives in a thickly forested island off the coast. So it has individual song variations that mark off the territory of each bird, and keep the partners together on their own small home run. But the language of identification begins much earlier than this - even before the nestling hatches from its egg. Eggs in a nest all hatch together - in spite of having been laid at separate times. And there’s a good reason for this. Towards the end of the incubation period, clicking sounds are heard in quail eggs and others. They're audible to chicks in neighbouring eggs. They synchronise development - speed it up or slow it down - so that all the brood hatches out at once. Later, parent and chick exchange sounds. In the countdown before

hatching, the chick is already learning the family language, so valuable to ground birds in the hazardous stage after hatching.

God's timing is always perfect. He has equipped birds with amazing instincts to synchronise their behaviour so that things happen on time, and rendezvous are kept. Though we seldom realise it, God's timing works in our lives too. If we want to, we can have appointments with Him. They will bring heaven and earth together in a constructive adventure of love. Timing is built into birds' lives so that they meet for a purpose - the joint production of a new life. When we meet with God, again something new is born - a man in Christ Jesus, a now creation, a child of God. For, "if any man is in Christ he’s a new creature,” the Bible says. "Old things are passed away; all has become new." We can't afford to neglect rendezvous that God plans in His care for us. They will generate love, and bring dimensions into our lives that we never dreamed of.

The Life Flow

Nature Shows the Way - the way God creates and sustains life. He creates it with a plan and design - and sustains it with a flow of matter and energy. When a seed springs to life, it draws on a stored package of ready-made materials. But before long it needs a flow of sap from soil to leaf to sustain its life.

Now, the early botanists knew about this flow of materials - in the human body. Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood - with the heart acting like a pump; the arteries taking the food-laden blood out to the tissues; and the veins bringing it back for replenishment. Many thought that the same must be true of plants - that the sap circulated, pumped by the roots. The microscope, newly discovered, showed plant stems packed with tubes, running from roots to leaves. Did the roots pump sap through these tubes to the leaves, and back again in a sort of round trip? An English vicar didn't think so. He commenced experiments to find the real truth.

First, he fixed a leafy branch to a tube filled with water. He found that the water was soon drawn up the tube. Where did it go? A watertight bag fastened over the leaves provided the answer. It collected water - the water that had passed through stern and leaves to disappear into the air. Evaporation was the pump that drew the water up from the soil.

Next, he had to find what course the water took. Those who believed in the circulation of the sap thought it moved up the inner part of the stem and down through the outer bast; the water continued to rise through the inner wood vessels. Nor was it descending through the outer bast as some thought it should; for when he cut a notch in the outer stem it was wet at the lower end, but dry above. It was evident that water carrying mineral salts from soil to leaves made a one-way trip, disappearing into the air, and leaving the minerals behind it in the leaves. From these raw materials, the leaves made their complex life molecules, which the plant could use as food, and store as reserves.

Now, this shows the plant’s vital economy to be very different from ours. We start with complex food molecules, energy-filled, made by plants. The circulating blood feeds them out to the body to have their food and heat energy removed; then continues back to heart and lungs with the broken-down molecules as waste. It's very much a closed system, powered only by plant energy. But the plant system is different. It opens up its cycle of life to the soil for replenishment at one end, and to sun and air at the other. With a constant supply of water and minerals from the soil, and carbon from the air above, it can build its own big chain molecules. And from the sun itself, across space, it draws light energy to power this productive machine.

So the plant's life, firmly rooted below, draws energy from above. Nor were we on our part, ever meant to live within the closed circuit of our own resources - but in the light and power of God's love. It's easy to exist in a second-hand sort of way. Self-confidence and pride say, "Live independently." "The best person to trust is yourself." But it's just as easy to run out of personal resources in time of crisis. We find that we need a power outside ourselves. At such a time, the only way is to open up the closed circuit of our lives to something new - the love energy of God. We find this - in the way we understand it best - in the life and death of God's Son. He brought a new understanding, a new outlook, and a new way of life into our world. He offered forgiveness, a fresh start and, with this, the continuing living presence of the Holy Spirit. "When the Holy Spirit comes upon you," He said, "you'll be filled with power." And we are.

Fine feathers make fine birds

Feathers are a bird's stock-in-trade. It uses them for flight and covering – but also for dress, to lure and impress its fellows. Love and partnership are important elements of a bird's life - important for co-operation in brood raising. Endowed with much natural charm, birds use their art to win and attract. There’s a whole language in feathers - and birds know how to use it.

The Australian lyrebird lives in tangled forest undergrowth where flight isn't necessary. So, while most birds have well-constructed flight feathers - zipped together with tiny hooks into an airtight web - the lyrebird's tail feathers are designed very differently. With no hooks to bind the web, the feathers fall apart into loose, filmy plumes. The two outermost - long and gracefully curved - form the outer frame of the lyrebird's lyre. The middle plumes are long and ribbon like, to form the "strings" of the lyre. In the breeding season, this remarkable tail, usually folded, comes to life. The male finds an open space, and rakes leaves together into a dancing stage. There he bursts_ into song; and slowly unfolds his super tail to form the feathered "lyre". Tilting the long tail feathers forward still more, he brings them cascading to the ground over his lowered head, in a widely spread fan of silvery plumes - a performance that’s calculated to win the admiring female over to the important project of mating and nesting.

The Birds of Paradise in New Guinea go even further in the art of feather dressing. Not only tail feathers, but others on head, back, throat and breast become lacelike, velvety, or shine with metallic iridescence. Again, the cock bird stages a spectacular mannequin parade, often assisted by other males. The special display plumes cascade over the back in filmy clouds of colour; or make a head-dress of waving, nodding flaglike plumes - as the dance of the males accelerates to a climax of frenzied emotion.

Another performer in feathers from this part of the world is the Argus pheasant. Its long pheasant tail has six-foot plumes, as handsome as they are long. Even its wing feathers are designed as much for display as they are for flight. They have long chains of eyespots, highlighted and counter shaded to give a three-dimensional effect, as though standing out from the flat feather. When the cock pheasant opens out his wings for display, they form a complete circle of feathery grandeur. From its centre, only the bird's head is visible, peering out to study the effect of the display en the modestly attired lady who is watching.

The peacock has an equally dramatic way of presenting his tapestry of colour to the peahen. The eyespots - set out this time in iridescent blue and green - gleam like jewels from the huge tail feathers, to make a seductive bouquet of colour. Spread out, they stimulate the hen bird optically, affect the flow of hormones and pave the way for mating and

egg-production.

Natural selection altogether fails to explain the complex design of eyespot and feather. Or the remarkable use of display, to synchronise the breeding roles of two partners in the game of reproduction. Only intelligent planning and a divine architecture of feather and plume could unravel such a sequence of events, sufficient to co-ordinate the instincts of male and female, and stimulate them to produce the new life that emerges from a bird's nesting activities. God has committed Himself to the care of our world and the welfare of its creatures. Everywhere we look, there's evidence of divine concern and invention. Beauty matches intricacy, to ensure that life goes on. "Even the hairs of your head have all been counted, "Jesus said. “Not one sparrow falls to the ground without your Father's consent. You are worth much more than many sparrows! Each feather of a bird, whether for flight or display, is a miracle of design. How much more so are our bodies and our minds. And when we place our lives in the hands of a loving Father, who is the Architect of Life itself, we can expect miracles of light and life to ensue. And they do.

Birds in Concert

Man loves music and ceremony. So do birds To see them in display, or to hear them in concert, is to feel the affinity between birds and man. But their art is a less conscious one than ours. They sing and perform largely because they have to. God-given instincts, and traditions, rule their lives. But their performances are no less enjoyable and refreshing for all the unconsciousness of their art.

If you should camp in an unspoilt area of New Zealand bush, you may hear the dawn chorus of the birds. The original orchestra is much reduced in number, and you won’t get a full performance. The South Island thrush with its "crystal flute," the yellowhead with its chorus of quavers, the- merry brown creeper with its skilful trills, the organ notes of the kokako, the cymbals of the kaka - may be missing. But we may still hear the resonant bells of tui and bellbird - a vast chorus at dawn, or an outburst of melody when sunshine follows rain. When the summer birds have settled into song in our gardens, there’s another dawn chorus. It may break onto a drowsy world with a muted thrush's note, to set the whole garden ringing with "the loud beauty of thrushes" and the melodious strains of the blackbirds, into which the smaller birds scatter their less resounding trills.

There’s a reason for our enjoyment of bird song. It's as musical to our ears as it is to the birds, because we find in it the same rhythmic and melodic balance that we find in human music. Many birds use airs with variations, and practice them daily, combining phrases in various ways until they're satisfied musically with the song.But the exuberance of dawn isn't all that draws birds into song. More personal emotions usually find their place. Tropical birds, living in a yearlong summer, may pair for life, and hold territories throughout the year. There’s a strong bond between the two partners, and they express it in song duets. The boubou shrikes, in the thick cover of the African forest, work out a joint pattern of song. Each partner has to learn its mate’s contribution in order to fit its own part into the melody. So one sings a phrase, the other replies with its own distinctive answer, carefully practised, in recognisable timing and rhythm. The duetting builds a strong bend between the two, keeps them together and secure in their own territory, and holds rivals at bay.

Birds have night concerts too. In the Central American rain forest, wood quail face each other in the darkness and sing a woodland duet, with perfect timing of call and answer. The New Zealand bush echoes at night to the soft call of the native owl, in search of its mate. The answering "more-pork" follows soon after; and an eerie nocturnal duet ensues.

Birds even have aerial concerts. In pairs or parties, the crested screamers

of the Argentine rise above the pampas, to pour out a torrent of sound; male and female in harmony; the long, ringing notes of one answering the deep bassoon of the other. With perhaps a thousand birds in song, the air trembles to a stirring tempest of sound.

The concert season of the birds is spring, the tine of mating, nesting, and family care. Singing together means working together. In a world of discord and disharmony, birds work together, constructively. It can happen with us - when we lose ourselves to universal love - to God who sent His Son to earth, reconciling us to Himself and to our fellow men. In the light of His love, we see ourselves -and others - in a new way. Self-giving replaces self-getting. "Love has a way of being constructive," says Paul. "Our love should not be just words and talk; but it must be true love, which shows itself in action," James says. In birds, such action is motivated by instinct; and it arises from song - spontaneously. It can be just as spontaneous with us. But it’s motivated by something more than instinct. We’ll do the most demanding things cheerfully, when we find our spring of action to be divine love.

No. 201.......................................................................................................................................1Episode No.202..........................................................................................................................2Seeing in Depth..........................................................................................................................3The Hostile World....................................................................................................................5Parenthood..................................................................................................................................6Childhood...................................................................................................................................7Agents of Release.............................................................................................8What we can do with Light....................................................................9Light Receptors..................................................................................................11Beacons of Light and Life......................................................................13A Plan for Growth............................................................................................14Walls of Separation..................................................................................................................15Springs of Action.....................................................................................................................16Elements of Life.......................................................................................................................17Agents of Life..........................................................................................................................18Finding Each Other..................................................................................................................19Care Centres.............................................................................................................................20Where is Home?.......................................................................................................................20Undercover Agents...................................................................................................................21The Light Response..................................................................................................................22Invisible Allies.........................................................................................................................22Seeing and Knowing................................................................................................................23Knowing by Touching..............................................................................................................24The Architecture of the Atom..................................................................................................26Agents of Change.....................................................................................................................27Dependent Living.....................................................................................................................29The Life-Giving Stream.............................................................................31A Matter of Language................................................................................33Building to a New Plan..............................................................................35Spontaneous Living.......................................................................................36On Eagles’ Wings..............................................................................................38Guided into Action..........................................................................................41Chain of Command.........................................................................................42Seeing is believing.........................................................................................44LANGUAGE IN COLOUR..............................................................................45Living defensively...........................................................................................47Finding our Niche.............................................................................................48The Independent Self.................................................................................50Energy in an atoll.............................................................................................51Where do you belong?...............................................................................54The Search for Light.....................................................................................56Spheres of Influence....................................................................................58

Bird Ballet..................................................................................................................60Life’s Rendezvous...........................................................................................62The Life Flow..........................................................................................................64Fine feathers make fine birds.........................................................66Birds in Concert..................................................................................................68

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The Christchurch Recording Centre - riroriroriroriro.org/family/talks/all_talks/publish_A.doc · Web viewThey travel on the air, and are detected, chemically, by the insect’s