Home > Newsletter > By His Grace
Fingerprints
Have you ever taken the time to really look at your fingerprints? They are rather remarkable. Unique patterns of ridges, spirals, whorls and loops, they offer a reliable means of personal identification not only because of their individuality but because of their permanence as well. Other personal characteristics change; fingerprints do not.
Sir Francis Galton calculated that the odds of two individual fingerprints being the same are 1 in 64 billion. What makes that even more incredible is that there are only seven types of fingerprints, but the many different ways that the ridges can come together or split apart make for a huge variety, so much so that no two fingerprints are exactly alike.
Did you know that the pattern is the same on all your fingers, just sized differently? But what I love most about fingerprints is the fact that the patterns form on your fingers before you are born. You are uniquely "you" even before you see the light of day.
As you go about your day, the natural oil on your skin comes off and makes a pattern on the objects you touch. You leave your mark wherever you go, whether you realize it or not. With the right equipment, people can tell where you have been long after you are gone.
I can't help but wonder if we have spiritual fingerprints as well. If God designed our body with such detail, wouldn't He have done as much or more so with our spirit and our soul? Unique characteristics, talents, gifts, inclinations. All modeled after His Spirit but uniquely our own.
And just as we do with our fingertips, I believe we do leave our spiritual mark on everyone we touch, consciously or unconsciously.
If we spend enough time with a child, for example, we do see the parents' "fingerprints." It is more than a family resemblance, more than just genes. Their influence, their spirit, eventually shows.
That realization can be sobering and encouraging. Sobering, because it makes us realize how careful we need to be. Encouraging, because it means that no true effort is ever wasted. In time, and under the right light-the right circumstances it will show. And people will be able to tell where we have been... long after we are gone.
-Maria Lund
-Maria Lund