"Interrogatives.........................."

Whenever I’m sitting in somebody’s office, my usual tendency is to seek whatever copies of National Geographic might be hidden in the pile of magazines, the pictures they contain, admittedly, being that which captures my attention for the most part. Sometimes, though, the articles pertaining to the photos gets me as well, particularly if the subject matter is biological or cosmological, scientific facts to take my mind sailing into the deep. Yesterday afternoon, while waiting for my granddaughter to fulfill her appointment with the dentist, was such an occasion. The mystery presented unto me was various killer parasites, one, with a name already lost to an old man’s memory, abides in creeks and ponds shallow enough for children to entertain themselves, splashing, wading, chasing dragonflies. Yet, while there is no plausible reason why it shouldn’t interject itself into a human’s life, it seeks out tadpoles only, as if its DNA contains specific instructions as to just what it may or may not utilize as a host for its appetite. Even weirder, after the invader has eaten its fill and matured to a certain stage, it repositions itself in its victim’s brain, leading it in a sense to commit “suicide by bird”, surfacing with no attempt to escape being dinner for the next crane in the neighborhood. Thus eggs are spread and the cycle is repeated again and again. The assassin has a cousin which attacks cats in much the same manner, the final stages of cohabitation involving a lobotomy; but Puss-in-boots often survives, departure in this case not involving his having to cross paths with a German Shepherd. Such phenomenon might well puzzle some folk (Annie Dillard comes to mind) in so far as why a loving Creator would have made this particular method of “population control” part of the big picture; but what I see is “precision”. It is, in truth, a schematic such as none other, designed by Deity so that “all things work together”, in a sense a “perpetual motion machine”. To believe that all this evolved out of some original single-cell creature crawling out of primordial muck is more than my brain can fathom. While it might likewise be said that God, Himself, is beyond my ability to assign any definition that completely contains all that He is, yet His reality exists as a solution to all my questions, an anchorage that holds me on this side of the veil. Thus secured, there is peace in exploring the deep…….