People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:13-15)

Growing up in a small Michigan town in the years immediately following WWII and living in a warm and loving Christian home was in many ways idyllic.  Mom was the typical 50’s homemaker, who accompanied her washing, cleaning, and cooking duties with radio broadcasts from WMBI (the long-range AM station from Moody Bible Institute). Dad was the typical bread-winner, who came home every evening, stopping to pick up the newspaper on the front steps before coming in for supper.

The whole family ate breakfast and supper together (lunch, of course, we kids garnered from our lunch boxes at school), and after supper Dad read to us from Elsie Eggermeier’s Bible Story Book. Afterward, he and Mom read the paper and we kids played or tuned in to comedies or mysteries on the big Motorola console radio.  Bedtime meant bed-side prayers, which always began with “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep.  If I should die before I wake, I pray thee my soul to take.”  That was the school-year routine. [Lunch box photo source.]

But summer—ah, what a joy!  After breakfast, the OAK boys (Ohlman, Andrews, and Kenfield) met briefly to determine the plan for the day—which we would share with our moms, who then simply asked whether we were coming home for lunch or if they needed to pack a sack lunch for us.  Hastings was divided into quadrants, called wards, and the typical rule for kids was this: if you knew your four-digit phone number and knew your address, you were free to roam your ward.  Mom’s knew you were somewhere in the ward unless you asked permission to go to another ward.  Each ward had its own elementary school, so most of your friends were from your ward.

Ours was the First Ward, which was blessed to include a few town-edge farms.  Closest to us was the Kelly farm with probably 80 acres, which included a cornfield, a couple pastures, and a wonderful woods with a muskrat pond, a creek, and an old railroad bed (the former Chicago, Kalamazoo, and Saginaw Railroad—sometimes called by the old-timers the “Cuss, Kick, and Swear” railroad).  We called the now trackless bed “the tramp trail” because hobos sometimes used it to walk from town to town and job to job.  On occasion a tramp would show up at our back door, and Mom would usually give him something to eat on the back stoop, an act that earned our house a hobo mark that indicated that the kind lady living there would give you something to eat. [Chicago, Kalamazoo, and Saginaw Railroad photo source]

We called Kelly’s woods “the grubs,” (our having no idea where that name came from).  But the grubs was where I received my outdoor education and my love for nature.  The OAK boys sometimes spent the entire day there making tree houses or various hideouts, looking for frogs to catch and dispatch so we could eat frog legs (which really do taste like chicken), shinnying up and swinging on saplings, or picking wildflowers to bring home to our moms (Lanny Kenfield’s mom was blind, and she especially loved the fragrant violets).

How I miss those days now—missing them mostly for our grandchildren, who often ask me to tell them stories of my childhood adventures: about the time a captured turtle bit my belly and sent me home screaming in pain as he flopped up and down, about my cocker spaniel tripping up a bull who was chasing us in Kelly’s pasture, about my cutting my foot with a hatchet I had found in the grubs, and so forth.  Sometimes I’m able to take our grandchildren into the woods, but that doesn’t make up for the opportunity of their being free to wander, play, entertain themselves, and become intimate with the woods and pastures.  Kids need to experience—and explore—the outdoors.

About a month ago while walking on a newly-built roadside trail, I did discover a couple boys building a hut in the woods, and it filled me with nostalgia.  Fortunately I had my camera with me and could capture an activity that has now become so rare.  The Wonder Kids page of this website is provided to give parents, grandparents, and other child caregivers tips about getting kids back outdoors and ideas about instructing them in important truths about their Creator and His “other book”—what theologians have termed the “general revelation.”  Nothing electronic can come close in value as an “educator” of children than the wonders of God’s creation.  We gotta get ‘em out there!

I wonder how many children of Christian parents even know that Jesus still lives, that He is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, and that He is the Redeemer who with the Father keeps and eventually takes our souls and will ultimately return those souls to incorruptible bodies that will enjoy endless life on a restored earth.  Teach that to a kid today!

To my dear friend Gaius, whom I love in the truth:  Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well.  It gave me great joy to have some brothers come and tell about your faithfulness to the truth and how you continue to walk in the truth. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth (3 John 1:1-4; the last sentence quoted by my mother on a photo sent to me of my dad and her when I was in college).

I can still picture in my mind the plaster plaque that hung on the wall by the back door of my childhood home. Thanks to the loving grace of my heavenly Father, its message became the cornerstone of my existence: “Only one life; ‘twill soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.” That house at 715 N. East Street in Hastings, Michigan, seemed old when we moved into it in 1945, but it’s still there. [See the story of the pictured plaque here.]

Our family of six lived there for eight years, our dad having become a partner with another Christian man in Hastings Motor Sales, a Dodge and Plymouth auto dealership. Hastings is the county seat—the governmental center of Barry County, a blue-collar region in central West Michigan. A few factories in the town provided the majority of bread-winner jobs. One was the once-famous Hastings Piston Rings Company—a plant about a quarter of a mile from our house, where we kids used to scrounge around for cast off springs that we extended from dowels and shot at birds.

Barry County has numerous lakes and the large Yankee Springs Recreation Area, and it remains a popular hunting and fishing destination. It seemed that anything with fins, feathers, fur, or four feet was fair game. Every hawk I ever saw was a “chicken hawk,” and needed to be shot. Crows were “corn robbers,” and everyone with a gun was doing his civic duty to shoot them—which is probably the reason I never saw a crow close-up until I was an adult!

My two boyhood buddies were Lanny Kenfield and Dickie Andrews. My last name starting with O made the acronym for our trio a natural: the OAK boys. If you’ve seen the popular old movie “A Christmas Story,” you have seen our combined story: I was the one who got his tongue stuck to the pipe in the school playground in mid-winter (on the “jungle-gym”) and had to be rescued by our third-grade teacher, who poured warm water over the pipe and my frost-bitten tongue (I guess that’s another aspect of the adhesive quality of water!).

I think we all had BB-guns by the time we were 10—mine, a Red Ryder model, coming as a surprise Christmas gift just like Ralphie in the movie. And I did almost shoot my eye out a few days later from a BB ricocheting from a piece of metal I was using as a target. Having an air rifle, however, was what started my long love-affair with the outdoors. Looking for prey with fur, feathers, or four feet in farmer Kelly’s woods near our house helped to make me an acute observer of the natural world and inadvertently made me the “nature boy” I’ve continued to be.

My long childhood hours in the outdoors along with “perfect attendance” (with several pins to prove it!) in our Baptist church Sunday-school were critical in what today is called my “spiritual formation.” Having godly and loving Christian parents and the secure home they provided, being free to roam the countryside, and being motivated to eventually go on to a Christian university (Bob Jones University) all cemented in my heart the wonderful words of that gaudy old plaque and eventually led to the awesome privilege I have to host this Wonder of Creation website for RBC Ministries.  RBC, along with the Bible teaching of its founder, M. R. “Doc” DeHaan, were no-doubt the most significant factors in the spiritual formation of my dad and mom, both of them coming to Christ through his ministry and taught for almost four decades by its radio programs and its Our Daily Bread devotional. [M. R. DeHaan photo source at Wheaton College]

If you will indulge me, I’d like share more of my story over the next few posts—and perhaps help make the point that truth from God’s awesome “other book,” the book of His works, ought to be a part of the spiritual formation of all who have placed their faith in Christ the Savior—our Creator.

The LORD] knows how we are formed; he remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. But from everlasting to everlasting the LORD’s love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children’s children—with those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts (Psalm 103:14-18).

Not too long ago one of our grandchildren, Danika, was watching me leaf through a book. Shortly afterward she caught my eye as she was paging through one of her own books. She was very deliberately licking her fingers and trying to turn pages—without a great deal of success.  Dani had seen me wet my finger to turn pages and by experimentation sought to discover why. So I explained to her that water makes our fingers more sticky—which is important when papers you’re trying to separate are extra smooth and dry. This is due to water’s adhesive quality. In her young mind, of course, it seemed silly—because “water makes things more slippery!” May God grant my child’s child long life and many years after Grampa’s material body has gone back to the dust to learn more and more of the wonders of water—and remember to obey God’s precepts.

In my last post I mentioned the weird, but life-critical, way that water differs from other liquids that get denser as they get colder—and its cohesive qualities. In today’s post I’m touching on three other vital wonders of water:

Adhesion. While cohesion causes water molecules to stick together, adhesion helps water stick to other things. We experience this when we try to separate stacked glass tumblers that have virtually bonded themselves with a thin layer of water. It takes an amazing amount of pull to accomplish the task. Many a mom has scars to indicate that some of these attempts have negative consequences!

It’s this same adhesive force that creates capillarity: the ability of water to climb narrow tubes. Cohesion and adhesion in tandem make water molecules sort of reach up and grab the sides of a tube, and seemingly in defiance of gravity, pull themselves upward, while at the same time they reach down and grab fellow molecules and pull them along. It’s this property that allows water to move up through living plants—and blood, which is mostly water, to move through the capillaries of our bodies (albeit with some major help from our central “pump”).

Temperature Control. Water is the earth’s thermostat and the human body’s thermal regulator. What it does in relationship to heat is astounding in many ways. The key wonder is that given the behavior of other similar substances, water would be expected to become a gas at room temperature. Life exists because it doesn’t. Some water, however, does escape the surface of its liquid state and become vapor through the process of e-vapor-ation. Evaporation cools the surface area where it occurs. How it does this is itself a wonder: Heat applied to the surface of water causes the top molecules to “dance” with the higher temperature—like barefoot kids trying to cross a hot asphalt road on a summer day. Eventually these heat-energized molecules vaporize, rising like hot air balloons. This leaves behind the cooler molecules, lowering the temperature of the body from which it has escaped.

Water also stores heat extremely well and gives it up reluctantly. Those of us who live in the Great Lakes region of the United States are well aware of the result of this factor in the winter: “lake-effect” snow. Water vapor rises from the surface of the heat-retaining large lakes and condenses into snowflakes in the drier subfreezing air. Prevailing winds move the subsequent snow clouds over land where they drop their crystal load–sometimes all within a few short miles of the shoreline. Residents of Buffalo, New York, can testify of the “vertical blizzards” that have many times left them struggling through chest-high snow to reach the curbside white mounds that mark the spot where they need to start digging for their cars.

Water’s ability to store heat and then hold it is just one more way that it supports life on earth. If it didn’t make up nearly 80 percent of the earth’s surface and didn’t store heat, the earth’s temperature fluctuation would become so extreme that all life would quickly cease to exist.

Dissolver. Water is called the universal solvent. Virtually all the naturally occurring elements have been found dissolved in water, from sodium to gold. And it’s clearly no accident that the most common elements in water are the most common elements in the human body. Of all the work that water does in, around, and for people, one of its most important jobs is its capacity to carry to every human cell the dissolved nutrients and critical components we need to live and remain healthy.

Yes, we are indeed made of the “dust of the earth,” but not without lots of help from the miraculous stuff we call water.

The LORD addressing Job:  What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no man lives, a desert with no one in it, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew?  From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? (Job 38:24-30)

This time of the year in these parts, the visible aspects of water begin to dominate two of our senses: sight and touch. This morning, for instance, “frost was on the pumpkin” and on everything else on the ground, its crystals sparkling under the first rays of our star. It won’t be long before the snow descends and ice forms to transform our landscape—and the way we drive our cars! I look forward to it every year, knowing very well that I will also be glad to see it go in March or April

To better understand what a wonder water is, it’s helpful to consider the amazing properties of water. These properties are so unusual that the finding of many scientists is the rather unscientific conclusion that water is simply “weird.” Students of this amazing substance have actually listed 38 anomalies of water—ways that water differs from what’s expected of liquids. And it’s these differences that make water so significant.

Density. The almost universal behavior for liquids is that when they get cooler, they become more dense, until their molecules virtually stand still. They freeze in their most dense state. Not water. What happens with water is that while it does get denser as it gets colder, when it reaches about 38° F the process stops. And when the temperature drops just six more degrees, it quickly becomes less dense and then freezes. That’s why ice floats. And it’s a good thing. If it didn’t do this, ice would form on the bottom of bodies of water—gradually building up until all life in the water was destroyed. This would in turn eventually destroy all life on earth.

It’s this same process that helps create the wonders that fascinate us every winter: the latticework of frost, the symmetry of snowflakes, and the light blanket of white that dazzles our eyes on cold sunny days. The 19th-century preacher and author George MacDonald, who became the inspiration for many of C. S. Lewis’ writings, was fascinated by nature—and by water in particular. He wrote the following reflection on ice crystals:

I walked home one winter’s Sunday morning after church. It was a lovely day. The sun shone so warm that you could not help thinking of what God would be able to do before long—draw primroses and buttercups out of the earth by force of sweet persuasive influences. But in the shadows lay fine webs of laces of ice, so delicately lovely that one could not but be glad of the cold that made the water able to please itself by taking such graceful forms. And I wondered over again, for the hundredth time, what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious, work of nature, always kept it beautiful. The beauty of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I thought. Because our God is so free from stain, so loving, so unselfish, so good, so altogether what He wants us to be, so holy, therefore all His works declare Him in beauty; His fingers can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness; and even the play of His elements is in grace and tenderness of form (Discovering The Character Of God, edited by Michael Phillips, Bethany House, 1989, pp.117-118).

Cohesion. The way the water molecule is formed and the nature of the elements from which it’s made result in creating a liquid with a surface “skin.” It’s this skin that dimples under the feet of the fascinating spider-like water strider, spreads its widening wake behind the zooming little backswimmer, and forms the concentric circles advancing outward from the impact point of a child-thrown stone. Even a sewing needle can be made to float on the cohesive surface of water. This cohesion, or surface tension, also makes water form the droplets so vital to other life processes—especially important to the form and function of the living cell.

The major part of today’s post is from my Discovery Series booklet “Celebrating the Wonder of Water.” Click on the title to find it on the Discovery Series site.  You can read it online, and you can follow the prompts and obtain a copy or two without cost.

The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God”
(Psalm 53:1)

The chairs are stacked, the patio table has been placed under the bird feeder to collect fallen seeds, the outdoor faucet is insulated, and the yew shrubs are trimmed so the branches won’t break under the weight of the snow that will come: I’ve winterized our condo courtyard.  The trees are winterizing too.  Our Juneberry tree sports only a few hanger-on leaves, and the neighbor’s overhanging Japanese maple is getting set to cast its crimson curls on our patio.  Tiny locust leaves are being tossed about like confetti in the autumn wind and swirling into piles without the aid of rake or broom.  Now let it snow!

Nature’s preparation for winter is always a cause of wonder for me—celebrated in the North Country by deep blue autumn skies that provide the backdrop for the main performance: the show put on by the deciduous trees and their brilliant leaves losing their green chlorophyll to reveal the stunningly bright pigments that were infused throughout the growing season.  The sugar-rich leaves of the maples are the stars—with reds, oranges, and yellows that elicit oohs and aahs from the thousands of color-tourists who are motoring all over the countryside these days.  A week of sunny skies has made this autumn spectacular.

In another couple weeks, however, the trees will be leafless, and we will enter the cloudy, gray days of November and early December—filling us with eagerness for the snow white spectacle that typically begins not too long after Thanksgiving .

This year I’ve been reviewing the science about the winterizing of the woods so I can do better “field schooling” for our grandkids—to answer the inevitable questions: “Why do the leaves turn color?  Why do the leaves fall?  How can the trees, twigs and buds stay alive when everything is freezing cold for so long?”

Here are a few answers.  The leaves fall because there is a thin layer of cells (abscission layer) between the leaves and the twigs that takes signals from shorter days and colder air and cuts off the water and nutrition “pipes” to the leaves which had been the tree’s growth factory for seven months.  Crescents left on each twig when the leaves fall toughen up in the winter—essentially capping those pipes for good.  New leaves will sprout further out on the twig next spring.  The growth of the tree is marked by the new wood between last year’s leaf scars and this year’s.

The chloroplasts within the leaves, which had made them green and did the work of photosynthesis (the making of matter from sunlight, carbon dioxide, water, and minerals!) simply stop working, and the leaves die.  With the water supply cut off from the trunk too, the buds become able to survive the winter—just like my outside water faucet.  If water stayed in the buds and twigs—or in my outside pipes—it would freeze, expand, and split them open.  Bad for the trees.  Bad for my house.  Even the evergreens, like the Austrian and red pines that line our road, prep for winter by the shutoff of water, by beefing up on freeze-proof resin, and by coating their buds with a waxy substance that will insulate them so they can also sprout in the spring.

And there are those who will tell us that this phenomenal, life-critical process came about simply by chance plus time—through undirected evolution.  I know and respect followers of Christ who believe in evolution as a God-designed process, but I really have to wonder how any life scientist could ever believe that the marvelous mechanism of a tree is not the product of a creative Mind.  What they call “evolution” has to be godlike to do what it they say it does.  In the end, as I see it, atheistic evolutionists have to believe in a godless universe in spite of the evidence, not because of it (Romans 1:18-20).