Fingerprints

I believe in fingerprints.  I don’t just believe in them—I am a passionate pursuer of all things fingerprinted.  

I went through a fossil stage as a kid (in all actuality, I can’t say that I’ve ever grown out of it), and I still have a box full of the imprints and remains of long-dead trilobites and ammonites.  Right next to that box sits a healthy assortment of feathers: all kinds of iridescent greens and blues of varying sizes and purposes dropped casually by birds en route to some greater destination.  Whenever I was fortunate enough to vacation in Florida, I’d carry a bucket to the beach for all the crazy seashells I’d find, and each delicate shell I plopped into that bucket erased a creature’s fingerprint from the sand.  Every organism leaves behind some proof of existence, whether miniscule or substantial, and I covet the exploration of these tokens.

There is one set of fingerprints in particular that sets my acquisitive heart all aflame.  Regardless of where I travel, I see these fingerprints everywhere.  There’s a delicate fingerprint pressed in the veins of fallen tree leaves.  It’s embedded in the mineralized image of extinct creatures and in the sutures of turtle shells.  Even sea urchins bear the seared fingerprint beneath their fleshy bodies: the creature itself dies, as all creatures do, and the flesh is stripped away to reveal a painted skeleton that marks the earth with a shockingly colorful design.  A colorful skeleton, for crying out loud!  For what purpose could a sea urchin possibly need vibrant, ornamental skeletal designs?

I admire the designs, but they’re not quite what fascinates me.  I’m fascinated by the Designer who etched those patterns into the sea urchin and the leaf.

The more I collect and study fingerprints, the more I recognize their source.  When I observe the world through scientific spectacles, I gain an exceptional appreciation for the mundane.  Things like mussels and sponges—the “simple” and “ordinary”—are so complex that I will never fully understand them, regardless of how many years I might dedicate to figuring them out.  Worms are supposed to be uncomplicated, plain creatures, but any high school student who’s dissected an earthworm can testify otherwise.

Life is complicated, but it works.  Sure, the organisms on this planet—plant and animal alike—are perfectly “adapted” for their respective lifestyles, but it’s bigger than that.  From the microscopic plane of protozoans to the ultimate grandeur of planetary motion, the workings of this world are coordinated and orchestrated so perfectly that any human designer should cringe in awe or jealousy.  Plan the intricate weavings of blood vessels, arrange the complicated symbiotic relationships between creatures, explain the origins of thought and reasoning in the gray slab of matter we call a brain, or organize the collaboration of each individual cell within a human body.

Yeah, I can’t either.

As human beings, we love to leave fingerprints: we often destroy, but only because we ultimately love to create.  Our creations—paintings, architecture, technology—are our fingerprints.  Then what is the world—All Creation—but one enormous fingerprint?  My box of fossils and collection of feathers are only stitches in the greatest tapestry ever sewn, but I hope that maybe, just maybe, by chasing after these fragments, I’ll find the Being who wove it all together.

At the end of the day, I’m a passionate pursuer of fingerprints not for the sake of the fingerprints, but because I desperately ache to pursue the Fingers that made them.