The Mantis shrimp is my favorite animal. There are a lot of fascinating things about the Mantis shrimp - they look like they wandered off of the moon of Pandora from the movie Avatar, they can break out of aquariums, the military is studying the composition of their chitin to improve armor designs, they can punch so hard and fast that they create these cavitation bubbles that implode into bursts of light and send shockwaves out to concuss their prey. But the most interesting thing to me about them is their eyes. Human eyes detect color through light-sensitive cells called cones. The cones in human eyes are able to distinguish between three color groups - red, blue and green. From these three different color receptors we can see all of the thousands of shades and hues that exist - puce and goldenrod and fuschia and seafoam and burnt orange and lilac and periwinkle and olive and all of the rest. We are so blessed to see all of the colors that we can, and all from just red, green, and blue color receptors. But we might as well be seeing everything in black and white compared to the mantis shrimp. Mantis shrimp have sixteen different color receptors. We literally can’t even imagine how many colors they can see . We might look at a plain manilla folder and see a flat, boring, uniform beige, but the mantis shrimp might see a dazzling kaleidoscope of colors and patterns that we are simply missing. Think about how much more beautiful even the most boring things in the world would be if we could see them through the eyes of the Mantis shrimp. The reason that I bring all of this up is that just like the Mantis shrimp, God can see a whole lot more than we can. God is painting a masterpiece out of our lives with colors that not only have we never heard of, but that we can’t even see. God moves in mysterious ways to us because we can’t see the whole picture - and I’m not just talking because we’re standing in the middle of it and are too close to make out all of the details. I’m saying that there are details that are all around us right now that we just can’t see. Just like we only have three color receptors, we also only have three temporal receptors. We can only think about things as part of a past, present or future, a beginning, middle and end. We can mix and match these a bit and imagine what if scenarios of how things could have gone differently if we had acted differently in the past, or how things might turn out depending on what we do right now, but at the end of the day, all of the versions of time that we can imagine are stuck within this past-present-future paradigm, just like all of the colors that we can see are derived from red, blue and green light. But like the Mantis shrimp can see light with sixteen different color receptors, God sees time with much more than just the three temporal receptors that we use. We were never meant to try to make our way through this life with only blind faith, but it might be accurate to say that we do have to do the best that we can with colorblind faith, or at least, relatively colorblind faith. We can still see a lot of God’s light with the natural spiritual discernment that we do have, and we can with dedication and effort and the grace of God become more sensitive to God’s light and He can open our eyes to see more and more of His plan for us, but we just have to trust at the end of the day that a lot of the things our Heavenly Father does will baffle and confuse us, like a painter painting with a whole palette of colors that look identical to us but are very different to Him.
