Static Charge

Have you learned two or three new wonders of our Creator-God in reading these pages this year? If so, I praise God, because that was part of the plan. No doubt, you already knew much of what you read here, but it never hurts to refresh the memory and pick up yet another opportunity to praise and worship our awesome God. As you can guess, there is so much more territory left to explore, so much more information to discover about the beauty and complexity of God’s creation, and so many more connections to make between understanding the natural world and what we can learn about the character of our Creator. My guess is that we will be spending at least a year or two of eternities in a study of this type-maybe more.

That we have so much more to learn was illustrated this morning when I discovered a new theory about static electricity. Now, you would think that static electricity is rather mundane. We have probably learned all about how it works. Rub a balloon on your hair or scrape your shoes across a carpet and an electrical charge builds up. The balloon will probably stick to the ceiling or to your clothes, your hair stands on end, and you can pass the charge to an unsuspecting classmate’s earlobe and get a good laugh out of it. What we have taught for decades is that rubbing nonconductive stuff together causes ions or electrons to transfer from one of the items to the other, thus building up a charge.

Bartosz Grzybowski used a powerful Kelvin force probe microscope to study the surface of nonconductive polymers that had been rubbed together in order to generate a charge. What he learned is that at the nanoscale level, an actual transfer of material occurred from one surface to the other. Thus, instead of just transferring electrons and some negative ions to one and building a positive charge on the other, he discovered patches of both negative and positive charges on both pieces. Indeed, he found wholesale transfer of material from one to the other and vice versa, leaving little fragments of charged material attached. The net charge of all the fragments is what counts.

Isn’t every human interaction somewhat like that?  I know some who tend to draw my energy, leaving me feeling drained.  Others energize and renew me. Does every human interaction involve more than the exchange of pleasantries?

Lord, how do I interact with others? Do I build them up or tear them down? Help me to realize that every encounter is a divine appointment and that represent You, the Lord of power and light.