I acquired an addiction a few months ago at school. While most teachers are covering up their consumption of diet Coke (not me) or chocolate (okay, me), I could not stay away from a new vice--a microscope. After school, instead of grading papers or planning for the next day, I admit to hours spent watching little protists skate across a microscope slide. I am fascinated that things so tiny could actually be alive!
There is a lesson in the contrast between reading about protists and actually seeing them. I'd been drawing paramecium and amoeba creatures since elementary school. I'd memorized their structures--could tell you about cilia and vacuoles, endoplasm and ectoplasm--but until this year I'd never actually seen one move. Similarly, I'd read about outer space and visited lots of planetarium shows, but until a few years ago when Ernie and I met some friends in the middle of the night in the Skull Valley desert, I'd never seen the rings around Saturn with my own eyes.
There is a lesson here about how to teach science, and how much more I could have learned if I'd been exposed to real things years ago (after all, I got a 33 on my ACT in science and all I've seen are protozoa?), but the greater message to me is about perspective. It's about seeing--both intimately and infinitely. And ultimately it's about love.
Microscopes are the tools scientists use to see intimately. No soft focus lens there! That's the way Christ sees us. With intimate understanding, not put off by our weakness, he loves "day-by-day, hour-by-hour, even moment by moment" (Callister, 2000). I've seen that kind of love in action. While I was visiting my sister with a newborn child, her Relief Society president dropped by for a visit. In her arms she carried a bag of fresh vegetables, and while she was there she prepared a fragrant homemade soup in my sister's kitchen. When my own family hastily checked into a motel for a night, a woman who barely knew us brought coloring books and candy for my children. Intimate Christlike loves dares to peek behind our smiling made-up faces and see hidden sorrows and feeble knees. That is the lesson of a microscope.
Telescopes are the tools scientists use to see infinitely. Time blurs as light travels long distance, the present becoming just a speck in the expanse of eternity. We can learn to see one another that same way, through the light of distant perfection, bringing patience to current struggles. C.S. Lewis said: "For God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been...And this super-added glory will, with true vicariousness, exalt all creatures." I'm reminded of the perspective of eternity when reading a patriarchal blessing, watching a sleeping child, listening to the Sacrament prayer. That is the lesson of a telescope.
Today's resolution is to see with intimacy and infinity, to love actively and patiently, to work joyfully and tirelessly. Again, solutions taught perfectly by the Savior.
Love this :)
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