The Physics of Grace 12-21-9

Anderson, South Carolina

I have had the great fortune of having received a fine education that has allowed me to paper my office walls with diplomas, degrees, and certificates from seven fine universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. This is no small grace in a world where less than 1% of the population will ever even see the inside of a university or college. Some of the things I was privileged to study were physical chemistry, physics, and mathematics at Northwestern University. I learned that there are many laws of the universe that are immutable – always dependable. Knowing the behavior of various substances is profoundly important if you are sitting in a spacecraft on top of a solid rocket booster bound for the stars. Predictability is absolutely essential if you are designing a powerful life-saving drug that is going to have minimal side effects.

Even before getting this wondrous education I learned something back in Boy Scouts, even earlier if the truth be known, when playing with matches and electricity while Mom was at work. Wood and electricity do not like each other, or perhaps in a unilateral way, electrons like wood too much. Put them near each other, and wood becomes an incendiary testimonial of the electron’s power. This is a consistent predictable reality. Countless nocturnal house fires cause the death of thousands every year when electrons in old frayed wiring comes in contact with ancient wood, burning up the dreams of those sleeping within.

I just received a refresher course in the yet greater power of another unseen force I was never told about in any of those hallowed halls of higher learning. None of my Newtonian physics texts mention this power but I have found it to be as real as any of the four fundamental forces of the universe, so well described by quantum physicists.

I went by a dear friend’s house to put up a coat rack and a clothes rod. It was no big deal to put up these two items. I enjoy good physical health and was a building contractor before going to medical school. It took me perhaps ten minutes with a power screw driver using those predictable electrons and some of those fine non-stripping square-drive screws. My friend thought she had won the Powerball. Debra struggles with catastrophic illness, as do her children. Home repairs just aren’t on her agenda. Doing ‘the next thing’ is all that matters.

While I was doing these tiny home improvements, my friend left to go collect her three special needs kids from the nearby elementary school. While she was gone I went down the hall to the bathroom and when I came out I noticed that the WOOD lamp on her night table was listing about 30 degrees. When she got home moments later I asked her about it. She said it had fallen over and broken some weeks earlier. With the intent of repairing it, we unplugged it with some considerable effort from a mass entanglement of plugs and cords under her big bed, the very one where her three children often come in the night for safety.

I looked at the lamp and was astounded to see that the insulation inside the lamp on both wires was completely missing and both copper wires were touching each other and the soft dry wood of the lamp base. I asked her when she last used it. “Last night.” I know enough physics to know that there is no way short of a miracle that this wood lamp had not exploded and set the house on fire and taken her and the three kids. This entire family is on heavy medication and would never have awakened. The newspaper missed out on a spectacular fire story because I needed to go to the smallest room in the house and noticed this lamp on my way back down the hall. A force far more powerful than the four fundamental ones described by the physicists has been operating in this small rental house, where a struggling family learned of this greater force long ago – the Grace of God.

With a chill I realized I had witnessed a quiet tiny miracle that had saved four lives and spared this safe little house from an incendiary disaster. What it also did was warm my heart greatly to this great power which is available to all, not just those fortunate ones of us with access to prestigious labs and universities.

It was with some awe and reverence that I took that little wood lamp home with me, intent on making it like new, and making certain that the wood and electrons never saw each other again. I stopped at the hardware store and bought the necessary parts to rewire and rebuild this lamp.

The lamp itself is another story. I called back in the evening after working on it to ask about it. Made entirely of wood by an immigrant Hispanic woman, the shade is twelve sided with hundreds of small holes cut through thin sheets of plywood to look like stain glass windows, each hole covered with a different bit of colored fabric. My guess is this lamp would have taken 100-200 hours of tedious labor to make. This woman makes these lamps to pay the hospital bills of a three-year-old boy in Mexico in renal failure. This particular one was an important gift to my friend. It was with even greater reverence that I took this lamp apart to rewire it and to repair the broken wood parts. I knew that I was working on the most sacred wood project I had encountered yet. I thought of the One Who was Himself a carpenter and made everything sacred. It seems my drills, sanders, and table saw have become my instruments of worship the past few days.

I had that sacred gift back in that little home within a day. Some things get priority in life. My friend needs the spectral glow of that beautiful lamp to remind her that the Greater Force is always predictable and sustaining. It’s hard to remember sometimes when the struggle is too big.

“Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? …Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? … “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”