More Gifts of the Sea

In my former life as a scuba diver, I remember night dives as mysterious encounters in other-worldly landscapes.

Everything moved in slow motion, wafting and waving gently in the undulating water as divers plunged into the night world of the sea. Quite a contrast to the vivid colors of reef life in sunlight, night dives offered pictures in shades of gray.

Field of vision was confined to the limits of hand-held lights. Particulate caught the light and revealed tiny inhabitants invisible by day. A slash of my hand through water left a comet of color in its wake--a trail of underwater dancing fireflies on a summer night as phosphorescence peppered the scene with neon sprinkles.

That karate chop of flashing color never fails to delight as I recall it even now. How often can we create light and color with the brush of a hand? A bit of undersea magic!

Then imagine the bleak wasteland of the ocean floor far below, where divers do not tread and the sun cannot pierce with shafts of light. Perpetual darkness. Or so I had thought.

But there is a strange shimmer scientists discovered decades ago at ridges deep under the sea. More than heat created by thermal vents, more than radiation said to be similar to the orange glow of a stove's hot eye, this glow actually has been found to have a source of illumination. This news causes us to rethink the lingering image of total blackness on the ocean floor.

The light source, invisible to the human eye, is real just the same. It confounds everything we thought we knew about what happens to the color spectrum in the absence of sunlight.

Hear that again: A mysterious light called "deep light" only captured on a special camera reveals that there is much we do not understand about our natural world. This discovery reminds me that there are forces we cannot see which uphold our world.

Gravity holds us.

Thermals carry birds when it looks like they are flying under their own power.

Currents in the air and sea would be invisible except that they determine our weather patterns and temperatures, and we can see the results in their wake.

Light waves behave in ways we thought impossible. Just when we think we've seen it all...

This image of light emanating from the depths reminds me to be open to the breaking through of the Spirit no matter how dark our surroundings, no matter how deep the pit we find ourselves in.

Light will always overcome the darkness.

The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness will never overcome it. John 1:5

http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arch/9_7_96/bob2.htm