Conspicuous Camouflage

Image of blue tang fish by Tewy via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-2.5

Whenever I did something wrong as a little girl, I thought I had a surefire way of escaping my parents.

I would hide behind a large potted plant we had and close my eyes.

Somehow, I thought that my parents wouldn’t be able to see me if I did this. Unfortunately for me, their eyesight was a bit better than I’d bargained on.

If you look at the natural world, you’ll find that I’m not the only one who often thinks they can’t be seen.

Take the blue tang fish, made famous by its cartoon equivalent in the Pixar movies “Finding Nemo” and “Finding Dory.”

Like a few other reef fish, this aquatic animal is blue and yellow. To other fish and to its predators, the blue tang is perfectly camouflaged. To them, its yellow markings seem to disappear against similarly coloured corals, and its blue body blends in with the shade of the water.

There’s only one problem:

To snorkelling humans, the blue tang sticks out like a sore thumb. Far from being camouflaged, this fish’s dramatic colours are incredibly conspicuous to our eyes. Why is that?

It’s because our eyesight is very different from that of undersea creatures. The particular trio of cones in human vision is especially good at discriminating blues and yellows.

So what is hidden to other fish is glaringly obvious to us.

I think God’s “eyesight” works in a similar fashion.

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God Sees You In Infrared

Photo by Veronica H. on Pixabay

Did you know that some birds and bees can see things that are completely invisible to us? They’re able to see in infrared, just beyond the wavelengths of the visible light spectrum that human eyes can detect.

What looks to us like a regular pink flower might resemble a helicopter landing pad to a bee. Where we see only the uniform expanse of one colour, the bee may see a target-shaped design involving different colours. The bee’s infrared vision allows it to home in on the most nectar-rich part of the flower.

The world looks completely different when you can see in infrared.

I sometimes think that God sees us in “infrared.” He can see things in us that are invisible to others, and even to ourselves.

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The Blessings of Not Seeing

Ishihara test for colour blindness. Those with normal colour vision should see a green W on a red background. Image by Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

The colour blind have to take a lot by faith.

The term “colour blind” means just what it says: unable to perceive certain colours. The most common type of this vision disorder is red-green colour blindness. People with this visual deficiency may see these colours as yellowish or greyish.

While these individuals have never seen red or green, they do acknowledge that these colours exist.

Why?

Because they trust in the conviction of others who have seen red and green. They believe that those who have had real-life experience of these colours are telling the truth. So the colour blind take our word for it that these hues genuinely exist.

Basically, they believe in the existence of red and green by sheer faith.

As believers in Christ, there are fundamental things that we have to take by faith, too.

And the Bible says we will be blessed for what we haven’t seen.

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Do You Abhor a Vacuum?

Image by 22594 from Pixabay

Aristotle said that “nature abhors a vacuum.”

So do I, frankly. Perhaps I should simply stop vacuuming? After all, who am I to argue with Aristotle?

Seriously, though, what that phrase suggests is that empty spaces are unnatural, and somehow or other nature will seek to fill them.

I encountered a dramatic example of this truism through a friend of my late father.

This friend had developed a disorder called Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Macular degeneration had left voids or blank spots in his field of vision. The brain finds these empty spaces to be disturbing, so in Charles Bonnet Syndrome it fills in the blank areas with patterns or random images from its memory bank.

The result was that my father’s friend would “see” people or animals that weren’t actually there. His wife would have to tell him that, no, there wasn’t really a stranger sitting on their couch, or a cow in their backyard. The hallucinations he experienced were just his brain attempting to paper over the upsetting voids in his visual field.

It seems that human nature abhors a vacuum, too.

We all have voids or empty spaces in our lives that we seek to fill: areas of dissatisfaction, lack of love or absence of validation. These blank areas make us uneasy, so we try to fill them up.

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God Sees You in Infrared

Bee on cosmos flower
Photo by Veronica H. on Pixabay

Did you know that some birds and bees can see things that are completely invisible to us? They’re able to see in infrared, just beyond the wavelengths of the visible light spectrum that human eyes can detect.

What looks to us like a regular pink flower might resemble a helicopter landing pad to a bee. Where we see only the uniform expanse of one colour, the bee may see a target-shaped design of several differently coloured concentric circles. The bee’s infrared vision allows it to home in on the most nectar-rich part of the flower.

The world looks completely different when you can see in infrared.

I sometimes think that God sees us in “infrared.” He can see things in us that are invisible to others, and even to ourselves.

Read more