"I'm just a little bit worried. Do you have some sort of plan? Have you been finally defeated by the cunning of these fully evolved men?"

— from “Letter from a Concerned Follower”, by Pedro the Lion

As of yesterday, the forecast for today called for 12 to 18 inches of snow. Bread was absent from store shelves last night (don’t ask me how I know), and local schools announced they’d be closed, even before any flakes had fallen. Modern science is an amazing thing, and the technological tools that man has developed are wildly fantastic.

I didn’t measure it, but I’d say we got about 1 to 2 inches of snow today, or what you might call a “dusting,” which is a little less than the foot and a half they were calling for. How could a forecast, just 24 hours ago, be so off? With all of modern science behind them, the meteorologists best guess was wildly wrong.

Before you get the wrong impression, I am not a science hater. I’m not a climate-change denier. I believe in getting kids vaccinated. Science is a passion of mine, and I have spent years trying to inspire a sense of wonder to my students through science. I believe that God has given us the information in the natural world, and the mental capacity to do things with it that would have been mind-blowing just 200 years ago. God has made us pretty brilliant.

But I find a strange comfort in science getting things wrong. With all the computer models, expert minds, and satellite images, there is still some mystery in nature. I’m not saying that God supernaturally shifted the storm to humble the braggadocious weather men. I suppose that’s one possibility, but more likely, they just didn’t have a complete understanding of what was going on. And I love that.

God is so much greater than man. His creation, whether you believe it is 10,000 years old or 14 billion, is vastly more complex than our best attempts to understand it. It is comforting to know that the God of the universe is my father, and he remains firmly in the driver’s seat. Throughout human history, we have attempted to understand our world. Every generation makes advances and assumes that they are the pinnacle of knowledge. Sometimes we forget that Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.” Then 18 inches of snow turns out to be a dusting, and we are left to realize that we don’t know everything.