My church's Bible study group was good last night. We're going through Margaret Feinberg's Scouting the Divine: My Search for God in Wine, Wool, and Wild Honey. Two things stood out to me.
1. We watched the DVD in which Margaret speaks. Margaret was talking about different kinds of bees and the distinct roles that they play in making honey. She then went on say that Christians in the body of Christ perform necessary roles, whether or not they feel that their work is important. She said that there are times when she doubts the importance of her own work. How can that be, when she is an author, speaker, and Bible teacher? Margaret responded to that question by saying that she doesn't see many of the people whom she impacts, and that she spends a lot of her time in research or in front of her computer screen, with no other company than God. In those lonely times, she wonders if she is making any impact at all.
I appreciated Margaret's honest comments about what it's like to be a writer. Personally, I like writing because of the solitude. I wonder what kind of difference I am making, and I assume that this feeling will go away were I to become published and more well-known. Not necessarily!
2. Margaret quotes the beekeeper she interviews in the book as saying that an atheist who sees a hive would believe in God, presumably on account of the hive's order. My pastor agreed with that comment, for he noted that each bee somehow knows its distinct role in making honey. He wonders how that could be the case, had God not programmed the bees to do so.
I wouldn't be surprised if an atheist could come up with an explanation. I don't fully know what it would be, but I wouldn't be surprised. I've heard evolutionists say that animals learn that something works, and then they pass on what they learn to their offspring, such that it becomes instinct. Animals that don't do this are the ones that don't survive. In this model, I speculate, bees found a way to support themselves by making honey, which happens to be delicious for humans, and so they were survivors who passed down that know-how to their offspring.
Feel free to comment, only don't put me or anyone else down as stupid. I admit that I don't know much about bees.