All Creatures of Our God and King

But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? Job 12:7-9

Our family vacations were never to the beach. I did not know what a jellyfish looked like until I was a senior in high school and spent a week with a friend in Atlantic City. I was fascinated as we stepped around all the lifeless blobs. While pictures make them look beautiful, you can’t persuade me that they are even remotely pretty. Susie Colby (All God’s Creatures) shares her life-lessons learned from jellyfish.

*****

People drive hours to visit rescued otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. With up to one million hairs per square inch, otters are the furriest of our planet’s cute critters. But when my kids were little, we returned week after week to see jellyfish.

Typically, people gravitate toward cuddly creatures or animals. But jellyfish can’t be tamed, and they defy comparison to anything humanlike; they are wholly other. With no backbone, no brain, no lungs, and no heart, jellies lack most of what we consider essential, yet they are alive. We watch otters interact and play, tumbling in the water, floating on their backs, and cracking shellfish with rocks. We imagine what it might be like to care for an otter or even to be an otter, a mammal with a play ethic.

But jellies lack even senses as we understand them, so we gaze at floating jellies, mesmerized, unable to fathom what it’s like to be a jellyfish. In their inscrutability lies their charm. The kids and I were drawn to watch in wonder, not because we could understand them, but because we couldn’t.

Only God knows why He created jellyfish, but I feel certain He too likes to watch them sway in the current, drift in the deep, and propel themselves through underwater canyons. Yet as I stand here watching, it occurs to me that we might have something in common with jellies after all. Perhaps the fascination my kids and I feel for the jellyfish is their murky mirror of the loving, never-tiring gaze of our Father upon us.

All Creatures of Our God and King

Father God, we offer praise to You for all of creation. Help us to take better care of this gift. Teach us to take time to enjoy these blessings. AMEN.