I had been meaning to go to the Natural History Museum since my baby was born. I had visions of wafting around a floor before a quick feed on a bench and popping home to conjure a healthy nutritious meal for my family. For those with - or memories of - newborns… laugh, my friends. Laugh heartily.
Anyway, a friend gave me a ticket to a baby sensory class in the marine animals room at the museum and it was the excuse I needed for a scramble over to South Kensington. When we finished up, we were encouraged to explore the rest of the establishment at leisure and, after dragging myself past a piece of pumpkin and butterscotch cake that had its eye on me, I followed my nose and ended up in - a collection of meteorites.
From boredom to inspiration
To be totally honest I felt like I was in something akin to the Indiana Jones library scene with the bookshelves cascading down - there were rows and rows and rows of cases of rocks. Perhaps not the most obvious topic for an article - 'Where is she going with this?' I hear you cry - and honestly I was expecting to be bored. But I was blown away.
There were not hundreds but rather thousands of beautiful rocks of all different kinds and colours, shapes and textures. Now I know I’ve already lost some of you - but this is my exact point. Rocks? Yawn. I had a deathly boring time with them in Year 8 at school - what a dull term of science looking at yet another beige piece of sandstone. What I thought I knew (and was tempted to skip and go back to find that slice of cake) had me moving on to the next cabinet, and the next, as if the glittering stones could be consumed and I was in a gigantic sweet shop.
I was hoping to find some jasper to show my likely uninterested munchkin strapped to my front, as his (middle) namesake is Jasper (the rock). Whether the stone from the walls of the New Jerusalem (see Revelation 21) is geologically the same as what we have come to know as jasper today, we may have to wait to ask St John himself.
'He didn't need to do that'
I found some form of jasper compound, but not the pure jasper I was looking for… among a collection of thousands of rocks... I was struck by how imaginative God has been, creating materials that would remain unseen for thousands of years, let alone be seen together in a museum to understand how varied ‘rock’ can be… He didn’t need to do that. Granite could have been good enough, marble alone would have been marvellous.
I’m sure a clever geologist can explain why I wouldn’t have found pure jasper in that collection, but I’m reminded that among 8 billion people there is only one of me, and I am intimately known and loved… and as we covered on the ‘Job’ episode of The Bible OverBrew podcast, God is wildly big and wildly creative. He really does have a plan and I can really trust my unknowns to this kind of knowable, big and creative God.
