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.