“Oh beautiful, for spacious skies; For amber waves of grain; For purple mountain majesties; Above the fruited plain.”
–America the Beautiful (Katherine Lee Bates; 1893)*

Last week, my family and I spent a wonderful week in Arizona with a million of our closest tourist friends. Most of our time was in Sedona and at the Grand Canyon, where parking lots were packed, traffic was heavy, and hikers were abundant.

Yes, it was Spring Break, but the attraction was the landscape: the jaw-dropping, knee-buckling majesty of mountainous rock formations and the deep dive of the Grand Canyon. Most of you have probably been there but, if you haven’t, add it to your bucket list.

We were told the Canyon began to form five million years ago, at a minimum. Likewise, those rock formations in the Sedona area took millions of years to reach their current heights.

I once heard about a man who was trying to comprehend God’s majesty. He prayed for an understanding of God’s concept of time. God answered, “A thousand years to you is just a minute to me.” The fella nodded, but then wanted an understanding of His economics. God’s answer: “A million dollars to you is just a penny to me.” Thinking himself to be clever, the man smiled and said, “Hey, God, can you spare me a penny?,” to which God answered, “Sure, just give me a minute!”

The point of the joke? God could have snapped His divine fingers and formed all of that Arizona beauty in a New York minute, but He let nature take its course over a long period of time. His plans are not our plans, and His ways are not our ways.

Without quibbling over how to square the one-week Creation story with our human knowledge of how Earth appears today, let’s just acknowledge that none of what I and my family witnessed last week was an accident. The perfect coordination of nature’s forces and the checks and balances that allow for our existence couldn’t have happened by chance. The Big Bang theory? Hardly!

Attribute the origin of physics, astronomy, molecular biology, physiology, and all the other sciences to random chance? I don’t think so.

There has to be a divine Father whose hand is over all of this. It’s hard to fathom, but that’s the essence of faith: “…being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1 NIV). We don’t see God, but we certainly see evidence of Him through His handiwork.

The title of today’s post comes from the Old Testament book Numbers. A modern-day translation of “What hath God wrought” would be, “See what God has done.”

Believe what you will and doubt if you must, but just look around. No need to go all the way to Arizona. See what God has done, indeed!

*Bates wrote the poem, later expanded into our unofficial national anthem, based on her experience at Colorado’s Pikes Peak, not Arizona’s grandeur … but we won’t quibble over that, either!