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\(^{14}\)I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.

\(^{17}\)How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! \(^{18}\)If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake, and I am still with you.

I can’t help but marvel at God’s power and wisdom when I think about what he has created. Something I love about my work as a civil engineer is learning and trying to figure out how things work. But the truth is that the way engineers and scientists conceptualise the way things work are gigantic simplifications. God actually knows what the real explanations are, but more than that he devised the workings of the universe in the first place. My mind reels when I think about it. With the psalmist I can say “wonderful are your works, my soul knows it very well” but I’m very aware I barely have the slightest idea of how wonderful God’s works are because there’s so much I don’t and cannot know, but even what I do know blows my mind.

Verse 17 talks about how vast the sum of God’s thoughts are. I have to put a great deal of thought into some of the designs I produce, but they are all so simple compared with what God designed. I intentionally look for ways to keep my designs as simple as I can reasonably make them and I still find them hard to reason about. God intentionally created things in a dazzlingly intricate and complicated way.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made. We can’t possibly understand our own minds and bodies.

Praise be to God for all he has made.