Finding God in a jellybean

“Jellybeans”

    ROOFTOP – Grab a pillow and plant your buns. I hated to drag out the ladder and haul up lawn chairs, so I just climbed out the upstairs window. Thought we’d use pillows to sit on. Whoever shows up late is going to be cushionless.   

    That’d be okay if it weren’t for the ridges and valleys on this metal roof. They’re a bear on the bottom. By the way, I had an uncle who died of that.

    This is an absolute perfect night for a roofsit. That breeze is a dandy. It must be overcast, ‘cause I can’t see a star up there. Can you? The moon is to your left, just a glow from behind the clouds. I’m sure you picked up on that. It’s so rare that I insult someone’s intelligence.

    I tell you this, you wouldn’t be insulting my intelligence if you tried to explain to me the speed and path of the moon’s revolution around the earth. I saw the moon out in the late morning, and it’s out again tonight. How does that work?

    I would think the path and timing would be constant. When I was a teacher I’d mention about the seasons and the earth’s rotation and the whole spinning on its axis at an angle thing. But, fortunately, no student ever asked me about the moon. Possibly, because I taught history and political science. Easier to work the sun into a historical discussion than the moon. Don’t know why that is.
 
    Speaking of weird stuff, you know how some people will try to prove the existence of God by pointing out something in nature? Well, they do. I’ve even done it a time or two. I never used the bumblebee thing, though.

When Mrs. Hamilton, my seventh grade science teacher, told me that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, I wanted to toss my 30 pound book at her. I’ll have you know that Dennis and I were sitting in a tree once and a bumblebee flew by and stung him right between the eyes. Just to be mean. Dennis swelled up till he looked oriental. I wish we would’ve owned a working camera.

Impossible for a bumblebee to fly? Right. What a terrible way to try to prove that God is here. A better way is to watch the segment I saw last night on “Factory Made.” That’s a show on the Science Channel. They showed the entire process of making jellybeans. A spiritual experience it was. I don’t know how many times I said, “Unbelievable!” Kay does.

    Did you know that they make a separate mold for each bean? Thousands of bean molds. And, they make ‘em out of cornstarch. Even reuse the stuff.

    They send a gigantic plate of cornstarch jellybean molds down to a machine with hundreds of little faucets that shoot the right amount of sugary jelled stuff into each mold. Takes a fraction of a second. I’ve got three outdoor faucets at my house, and I’ve never had all three of ‘em perfectly operational at the same time. The jellybean factory has hundreds, thousands of faucets that work perfectly in a fraction of second. And, they each shoot out the same amount of jell at the exact same moment.

    Then they cool and reheat and do bunch of other stuff to the beans before tossing them out. The raw beans are eventually coated with sugar, flavor and color. They do that three times. All jellybeans have the same insides. It’s the outer shell that gives them flavor.

    I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that humans did all of that, not God. You are so wrong. God wanted us to have jellybeans so he made some people really smart on how to use physics as it concerns machines and sugar. After hundreds of years of tinkering, viola!  Somebody hit on the jellybean.

    If you can watch that process and walk away with no sense of intelligent design, then you need to watch how balloons are made. You will not believe it! Kay finally had to say, “Darling, not another word. You’re just going to have to accept it.”

    I really believe I could come much closer to understanding how the moon works, than accepting the process of how balloons and jellybeans are made. Oh, and those fold-up pliers that have knife blades and scissors and whatnots in ‘em. Unbelievable!  Oops, I’m glad Kay’s not up here. – Next time.  

         A project being worked on at Texas A&M -- Jellybean corn. They're about two years away.

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