Like many momentous events, it all started innocuously enough. In this case, it wasn't particularly momentous, but it was because of some chicken wire and a fish pond. When we moved here two years ago, there was an abandoned fish pond on the other side of the driveway. Last summer I cleaned it out, but it wouldn't hold water. I figured that a cement lining reinforced with chicken wire would enable me to fill the pond to the brim. Enter my friend Otis who told me he thought he had some chicken wire lying somewhere around his farm. We looked through outbuildings and sheds to no avail. Then he decided to try the loft of his garage. As we entered, I noticed a rather grungy-looking grandfather clock standing just inside the door. When I commented on it, he told me his son rescued it from a fire; the original plan was to toss it on a bonfire, but Otis couldn't bring himself to do it. "I thought of fixing it, but don't think I'll get to it. Would you like it?"
I've wanted a grandfather clock for as long as I can remember, so my answer was both a quick and enthusiastic, "YES!" It sat in my garage all summer while I attended to more pressing projects, but I finally tore the works out of it, gave the case to a friend who stripped it, and waited. The gentleman who works on my old clocks told me the works weren't salvageable, but that he could order a new set from Germany. The case turned out beautifully, and with some help from little Gemma, we're on the home stretch.
When I took the new works out of the box, I was amazed. The old, water-damaged works were impressive enough, but the new ones are absolutely stunning in their beautiful intricacy. The proof is old enough, and though some esoteric philosophers dismiss it with their convoluted arguments, it has roots in the writings of Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas. It's called the teleological argument for Creation: intricate design implies a designer. In 1802, William Paley used a variation of this argument using a watch as an illustration. He said if you were walking through the woods and came upon a watch lying on the ground, you would know it didn't just arise by itself out of the soil. Design implies a designer.
I've read the refutations to this argument given by people much smarter than I, but I can't help think that the only people they would convince are those who are so invested in their agnosticism that they are willing to dismiss what is patently obvious to the rest of us. The intricacy of my clock works is not just a technological and mechanical wonder; they are a work of art, and it takes every screw, every cog, every gear to make it work. No piece by itself does anything, but a single missing piece keeps the entire clock from working. The same is true of this wonderful world we inhabit, except that this world is far more complex than my clock.
We never did find the chicken wire, and my pond is still only half full, but tonight I am grateful for this clock it led me to, and the illustration these new works give me of our amazing and almighty God.
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