Minute Praise

Miniatures impress me. Making something small and detailed requires great skill. To build it small, detailed and functional requires an artisan. Building small means non-stock, special materials and tighter tolerances. I’ve built quite a few things in my life, some that have had family and friends amazed. But then I get around my friend Chris and I feel like a total amateur. He used to have one of his masterpieces sitting under the window in his living room. It was a one-twentieth scale working steam tractor and it was not a kit. He personally machined every pencil-lead-size brass bolt himself. The oilers are made from cut-down glass automotive fuses. It all works, the throttles, the gears … everything. If you saw it and weren’t impressed, I’d be shocked.
 
In modeling, miniaturization is one of the highest expressions of skill. In the everyday world it is one of most advantageous displays of mankind’s ingenuity. We experience its marvels all around us. Here’s a comparison that I found between the Apollo Guidance Computer and the average smartphone. Your smartphone has 1,000,000 times more Random-Access Memory (RAM) than it and that RAM is 800 times faster. Your phone is 3,000 times lighter and 300 times cheaper without compensating for inflation. It is 50 times more energy efficient and … those statistics are already three years old. Gone are the days of swapping out tubes or even transistors. Today’s electronic devices are so miniaturized that to most of us they seem impossible … almost magical.
 
Modern society looks at a smartphone and praises the genius of its designer … and looks at a hummingbird and assumes it is the long compilation of random chances? Just the other night, a frog smaller than a grasshopper visited, perched near out door. Its skin was so thin that you could see its miniscule heart beating. And yet … this fragile creature could jump and cling and eat and reproduce. It even seemed to study me as I studied it. I thought, “So tiny, so detailed, so functional … what an awesome Creator we have.” Some would denigrate my musings about a creator as a backward and primitive superstition. I will not return the favor … I have no room to boast in recognizing the handiwork of God. Even that faculty is a gift of my Creator’s grace.
 
By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. Hebrews 11:3
 
(credits: https://superuser.com/questions/747202/how-do-modern-smartphones-compare-to-apollo-mission-computers)
 
 

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