Bumblebees & Me: Created by Design

All too soon, I’ll wake up one morning to find that the first frost has covered the landscape, signaling the beginning of the end of the gardening year. In the mean time, pollinators are taking advantage of the last bright blooms of the season. This afternoon, I discovered this bumblebee on some blue sage in my perennial beds, gathering pollen and filling the pollen baskets on her back legs to feed her offspring.

It’s been said that bumblebees are a miracle of nature, defying physics with their ability to fly. Because that myth was based upon the assumption that a bumblebee takes off like an airplane (which, of course, it does not), it has since been debunked. But to me, the little creatures are still miraculous. As is so much in nature, they are an example to me of a Master Designer who created all beings with a purpose.

I’ve had people question my belief in a Creator and even mock me a little, shaking their heads at my niaveté. They have been taught to accept as fact that a series of fortunate mutations led to mankind’s existence. But to me, the likelihood of that happening takes a lot more faith than believing in a God who spoke everything into being—except for the first woman, that is, whom God formed using part of the first man. But that’s another story for another time.

I choose to believe in a system of origins based upon hope and joy, and that includes my own beginnings. Scripture says in Psalm 139 that God sheltered me before I was born. Today, he knows the number of hairs on my head. He took great care in creating the flowers of the field and the birds of the air, and he sees when a single sparrow falls. But take him out of the picture, and this world and all in it become happenstance, with no rhyme or reason. The bumblebee and I become mere accidents.

That just seems illogical to me. Even setting aside Scripture for a moment, just looking  into the faces of my children, or walking through my garden and seeing the beauty and function there, I recognize the power of a mind whose ways are far above my own. And I take comfort in the fact that that same Creator formed me, made me for a purpose—just as he did the bumblebee.

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works.” –Ephesians 3:20a