[Today I had the privilege of speaking briefly to groups of elementary school soccer players...]
truncated icosahedron
That is the fancy mathematician’s name for the shape of a soccer ball, with exactly twelve 5-sided pentagons and twenty 6-sided hexagons, so 32 shapes altogether, with each pentagon surrounded by hexagons. There are 60 corners.
Why does that make me think of God?
I am reminded that we experience God in different ways. The Bible describes three of those ways as like a Father, like a Son (Jesus), and like a Spirit (that we can’t see). There are other things in this world that can appear to us in different ways even though they are all the same thing. Maybe you can think of some.
One of my favorite examples is a common kind of atom called carbon. Remember that atoms are so small that we can’t see them, but everything we can touch and see is built from billions and trillions of tiny atoms. Carbon atoms are everywhere in our bodies and the world around us.
What’s cool is that pure carbon atoms can organize in very different ways and appear to us differently, just as God does.
When organized one way, carbon atoms form graphite, like the black tip of a pencil for writing and drawing on paper.
When organized another way, carbon atoms are crystal clear and form beautiful diamonds that look very different from carbon in the tip of a pencil.
And not long ago, scientists discovered that carbon atoms can organize in a third way that nobody had ever imagined before – Carbon atoms can form tiny clusters of 60 atoms that are arranged exactly like invisibly small soccer balls – exactly the same arrangement of pentagons and hexagons, but all too small to see. How cool! There have been tiny soccer balls in the universe long before people figured out how to make them! That form of carbon has the funny name “buckminsterfullerene”. I think it is easier to say “soccer ball”. This form of carbon has different properties from graphite and diamond.
But, all three forms are still carbon.
When I see a soccer ball, it makes me think about how happy I am that God chooses to show himself to us in beautifully different ways.
8.28.21
