The other day I was watching an advertisement praising the efficiency of a certain bug trap. This product is designed to attract those unwanted critters and kill them, at which point they fall into an internal trash bin so the bug corpses can be easily discarded. This is when it struck me: We have designed a bug killing machine because we don’t like bugs. However, none of us could ever create a single fruit fly.

The Psalmist prays: “Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!” Being thankful for our complexity is preceded by our awareness. Without noticing that we are complex, how could we be thankful for it? So, ever since there were people, we looked at ourselves. We noticed our physical makeup, our cell structure, our DNA. We explored how our organs function and work together. We learnt how to intervene when there is a malfunction – hence the medical profession was born.

Like clockwork, our complex bodies work seamlessly when they are healthy. Sickness, however, robs our bodies of this unity and causes them to disintegrate and die. The same is to be said about the complex world we live in. Without pursuing unity, our world falls ill and is at risk of dying. Unity is often misunderstood as conformity. All totalitarian systems do. As much as demanding conformity stifles the human spirit, embracing complexity makes the world come alive. Seeing things from a variety of angles and working together despite different point of views, that’s the magic of unity without conformity.

God’s world is wonderfully complex and the more we find out about it, the more we can see how extraordinary His works prove to be. Let’s open our senses wide and take in what there is to explore. Each of us is a unique creation of God and His universe is bigger than we can imagine. Thanks to generations of scientific research we can appreciate this even more.