Bees

Bees have no idea how important they are.  How could they?  They’re bees.  Their brains are little and their lives are short.  According to a bee-keeping buddy of mine, the average honey bee lives for just a few short months and will only produce about one twelfth a teaspoon of honey during its entire life.

The real magic of bees, then, is not really in the honey at all.  Honey is delicious, of course, but nothing fundamental about our way of life would change without it.  The real trick bees pull off, along with other such creatures, is what they do on the side. 

Bees pollinate, and without pollination, much of modern agriculture would collapse.  Civilization as we know it is dependent on a readily available food supply, and much of this food supply relies on pollination.

We depend on bees in a way they cannot possibly imagine.  Bees simply do what they are designed to do, utterly oblivious to what is going on beyond their very limited existence.  Their greater purpose on earth plays itself out in a reality they cannot know. 

Strangely enough, this idea actually leads me to the very real reality surrounding my daughter’s recent birth.

About seven months ago, my wife called me after a doctor’s appointment.

“There’s something wrong with the baby.”

It’s rough, to hear those words and be unable to do anything about it.  The “something wrong” could not be diagnosed locally, and so my wife and I soon travelled up to Champaign.  After many hours’ worth of tests, we were told that our daughter would most likely be born with at least two birth defects:  an omphalocele and an aortic coarctation.

To put it briefly, an omphalocele means that part of the baby’s insides are forming on the outside.  An aortic coarcation means that part of the blood vessel leading from the heart is too narrow to move blood the way it should.  Both of these conditions are fixable under the right circumstances, but they are both sometimes related to life-threatening abnormalities.  Thanks to modern medicine, neither of these conditions are generally fatal in and of themselves, but they both often require multiple surgeries followed by a lifetime of observation.

During the next few months our appointments continued.  We met doctors at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, where she was to be delivered, and also at Children’s Hospital next door, where she would live until she was well enough to come home.  Some of those doctor’s appointments were comforting, but many of them were not.  The reality was, though, that until she was born, no amount of doctor visits would be able to tell us what we desperately wanted to know:  would she be OK?

            There was a point in my life, not that long ago, when this news would have been kept “in house,” so to speak.  We would have told an inner circle of people and that would be that.  We would have buckled down and gone about our lives and wait until Christmas to find out.

            Something made that kind of approach entirely inappropriate, however.  This was not bad news about a job or a mortgage.  This was our daughter.  She was being formed as we breathed, knitted together within her mother’s womb.  Waiting around for the due date just seemed a little passive.

            So we told people. We told many, many people: friends, relatives, colleagues and church family members.  We told people and asked them to pray.  Hundreds of people over the course of weeks and months took time out of their day to pray for a little girl they had not met. 

            On December 18^th our daughter arrived.  As expected, she had an omphalocele, but it was so small surgeons were able to repair it a few days after delivery.  More importantly, the heart condition that multiple doctors—examining multiple months’ worth of tests—told us would require surgery, never showed up.  Her heart was fine.  A recent follow-up appointment a month later solidified their post-natal diagnosis:  her heart was about as normal as any other five-week old baby. 

            Now, for many readers, this is simply a very comforting story that strengthens an already solid faith.  After all, the Bible clearly tells us to pray about such matters, and it is full of stories of healing.  For others, though, this is simply a story of a family who got off lucky.  After all, prenatal screening is not an exact science, and, like any science, it’s susceptible to human error and technical malfunction. 

            To be honest, though, this column is not really designed with either of those groups in mind.

This column is actually geared toward the “middle-of-the-roaders.”  Those readers, who, like me at one time, absolutely believe in a God capable of creating the universe and everything in it, but are not quite comfortable with the idea of human prayer influencing human events in a tangible way.  After all, such a situation brings with it a host of profound theological implications, such as, “Why do some prayers seem to work and some don’t?” or, “If God is omniscient, then why in the world would a human prayer have any influence on a divinely-sanctioned reality?”  These are very important questions that I simply do not have the newspaper space or the intellect to discuss in depth.

However, consider for a moment that the same God who created bees to make honey also made you to do whatever is it that you do in your day.  Also consider that the God who designed a world in which bees pollinate also put it in your heart to pray.    

Bees do not try to pollinate, they just pollinate.  It’s a byproduct of their natural behavior.  They affect the world around them without knowing it.

If a person believes that this natural behavior was designed by God, then how much of a stretch is it, really, to consider that human prayer can influence human events in a way we cannot truly comprehend? 

This is a question that many of us will ponder at some point in our lives.  As for me and my house, however, that question is answered.