And He looked at all He created and called it good.

I took a watercolor workshop a few weeks ago.  When I was AB it was one of the things I loved most - I belonged to a calligraphy society and had the blessing of studying with some of the biggest names in the Calligraphic art world.  It was pure joy.

What is it about creating something that nurtures the heart?  Whether you do it with art or music, spray paint or pots and pans,  it leaves you with a sense of satisfaction and delight.  Two of the workshop tasks were these :

I had never drawn this way before - the techniques I learned were worth the price of the workshop. It has been several years since I was well enough to take a workshop - and I had several people praying for me so I could last for two days.  I didn't make it all the way through the second day, but did make it 3/4 of the way.  I was thrilled. There is something about calligraphy and watercolor that really speaks to me - sort of like visual poetry.  And I find that fascinating because God calls us His "poema", His poem, in the Word.  Each of us is a masterpiece of design unmatched by anything man or any other being can create.  Man thinks he's such a hot shot, but he cannot create life - even though he stridently maintains that life "just happened" on the earth and "evolved" from there.  If it was so easy, why can't he figure out how to do it? How laughable is evolution when it talks about a "simple cell" that was formed from lightning (or something -  they're not sure) striking the primordial ooze on the earth's surface?  They don't tell you that a "simple cell" has DNA, the most complicated structure man has ever seen. If even one chromosome is imperfect there are horrible anomalies in offspring. It's akin to throwing everything that you need to make a watch into a paper bag, thumping it with a mallet, and expecting a watch to fall out! That "simple cell" somehow developed, full blown, an eye.  According to evolution, anything that doesn't work gets discarded - and there are so many working components to an eye that if even one was missing the eye wouldn't work - and evolution would have discarded it.  The myths of evolution read like some fantastic science fiction, which it is!

If you think it is real, please, just for one moment consider:  there is a flower in South America whose stamens and pistil resemble a female wasp.  The male wasps emerge before the females, and, thinking that the pistils are a female, the male investigates, and in doing so pollinates the flower.  Now, imagine the odds of something like that happening.  The wasp is the lone pollinator - how did the plant survive while "evolution" did its evolving over "millions of years.?"  No one can say. 

Why is there no fossil record of one species turning into another.  Surely one lizard-becoming-a-bird took long enough to be captured by the primordial ooze!  No one can explain that.

And what about the spider that lays its eggs in a stream by blowing saliva bubbles, diving,  coming up to get more air and blowing another bubble it adds to the first, and finally, when there is enough air in the bubble, it lays its eggs there and climbs out of the water.  While it was learning this essential behavior, a  million spiders would have drowned and the others would not have been tempted to keep at such a senseless exercise.

All of these are a ginormous leap from coloring changes in moths (dark moths congregate on dark trees: change the color of the tree to white, and the moths become white, ie., the moths that survive are the light colored ones because predators eat the easily seen ones.)  There is a world of difference between a light colored surviving moth and a lizard becoming a bird.

But I digress (sorry). Learning how to capture an image and compose music are two ways the spirit soars.  I call it a sense of wonder - I feel the same way in the awesome forests of Big Sur, near Carmel and Monterrey in California.  Or standing on a boat watching two blue whales, the largest creature on earth, circle around the boat while feeding for an hour.  Why does "wonder" or an appreciation of beauty happen?  There is no evolutionary benefit from my heart being filled with wonder and joy - yet it happens to every human at one time or another.

God gives us a little taste of the joy He experienced when He molded man out of dirt and breathed life into him.  We were created in His image - and being able to feel joy in creating something is part of that image. I am so very grateful that He gives us moments when we are "surprised by joy" as CS Lewis put it.  He could have made us able to live in a white, vast wasteland like the moon.  Or a world of molten methane lakes and waterfalls like Venus.

But He didn't.  His love for beauty and perfection stirred Him to create an unimaginable wonderland in that first garden.  This earth is tainted and torn, worn with age, groaning to be delivered - and yet, how the vast stretches of unimpaired nature move us, and how we thrill to the power of gigantic surf or the colors of coral reefs.

What must Eden have been?