This weekend we give thanks to God for the harvest … for little things that really are big things if we didn’t take so much for granted

But we do, we take so much for granted …

Yet life is full of wonder if we could see it … in little things like the food on the table … or a turnip, or where bread comes from … or my finger! No, I’m not going mad!

OK, forget my finger, try this – for my twenty first my Mum gave me one of my baby shoes all boxed up. It fits in the palm of my hand … amazing!

Still not good enough? Try the human brain! Try replicating the human brain!

Life is full of awe …

Turning to the big things; it’s a wonder, it’s amazing that there should be life on this planet at all, that anything should grow.

The universe is finely tuned to sustain life – so finely tuned that if any one of several factors was a fraction this way or that way, we couldn’t survive!

There are people who argue that’s down to chance.

It’s some chance because it is a precision so accurate that it is often compared to travelling hundreds of miles into space, throwing a dart at the earth and hitting a bulls-eye that is a trillionth of a trillionth of an inch in diameter!

You depend on that – if it was a fraction out you and I couldn’t survive.

And yet we can get so lost.

What’s happened to us (to so many) that we’ve lost the ability to appreciate life?

Of course, there are those who say that God has nothing to do with all this and use science to justify their argument.

Now, the best scientific minds will admit that we know but a fraction of all there is to know, that what we do know is but a tiny percentage of what can be known.

So, from a tiny percentage there are people willing to conclude – apparently scientifically – that there is no God!

Sorry, that’s not science, that’s faith in our own arrogance, our unsubstantiated belief that there is no God!

In other words, they give to a tiny part the authority of the whole!

So tonight let’s try to be grateful – life is bigger, much bigger, than you and me.

For small things and big things, for the wonder of it all, let’s be grateful.