Why Patterns?

Have you ever noticed that the sun comes up every­day? With­out fail. We tend to take it for grant­ed that the sun will rise. Espe­cial­ly as adults — we are tempt­ed to nor­mal­ize the unique. Earth is unique. We need the eyes of a child to open our eyes to this great real­i­ty. Noth­ing reveals the majesty of the hum­ming­bird quite like a child’s first encounter with the winged beau­ty. These real­i­ties are extra­or­di­nary and it requires our atten­tion to tru­ly see them.

Pat­terns are hid­den in the won­ders of cre­ation. No ordi­nary bloke can see these pat­terns, yet they’re made avail­able to all of us, even the ordi­nary bloke. We just have to have eyes to see. The pat­terns in nature reveal the mind of God, the order of God, and the beau­ty of God. Study­ing these pat­terns leads us to sort and orga­nize the world around us. This is a nat­ur­al ten­den­cy for humans, which just means that it’s an essen­tial part of being human. Even in the gar­den of Eden, before the fall, Adam sort­ed the ani­mals. We grav­i­tate toward bring­ing order to chaos, which is help­ful con­sid­er­ing this fall­en world. Cre­at­ing order by seek­ing the pat­terns in cre­ation is a wor­thy goal, but it falls short out­side of the rela­tion­ship with God and His rev­e­la­tion. In fact, dis­cov­er­ing the pat­terns is impos­si­ble with­out the won­der of rev­e­la­tion. Yet this does­n’t keep us from need­ing, inher­ent­ly, to seek God through His pat­terns. Learn­ing to see those pat­terns is one of the main goals of a math­e­mat­i­cal edu­ca­tion. By sift­ing through the details of a word prob­lem, trans­lat­ing a numer­i­cal val­ue into its prime parts, and pre­dict­ing truths from a geo­met­ric shape, we are learn­ing to dis­cov­er the pat­terns of this world that lead us straight to the heart of the Father.

We see the order­ly pat­tern-lov­ing God through the pat­terns that He fash­ioned. When we learn to see the pat­terns in cre­ation, we encounter God and his very nature strikes us as a won­der far greater than we could bear.