If you’re like me, your mind tends to drift towards the negative, the worst-case scenarios, that vague sense you have on a sun-shiny day that it’s going to storm. It’s not the place you need to be because it blinds you from seeing the good within the bad.
Like the other day, I went for a walk. It’s a daily routine that is part of my commitment to cardio health. On that particular day the weather was warmer and the ground drier, so I headed out for a souped-up hike across the fields. It’s not exactly the Appalachian Trail, but it’s not residential either. And I’d read where walking in the woods or simply wandering in nature is stress relieving and endorphin enhancing. It acts as a mood-enhancer, even immune-booster. For me, it’s also a time and place to pray: I’m in God’s creation. I’m moving. I’m thinking positive thoughts.
I was trekking at a pace that would have made Daniel Boone smile, when I decided to go off course, cut through a field, and explore new territory. About fifty yards into my new path, something kept pricking my hand. I looked down at my gloves to find they were covered in cockleburs. As were my blue jeans. And coat. I stopped and start picking the prickly burs off my clothes. Then when I started walking again, I only attracted more cockleburs. With every step, they seemed to multiply all over me.
Instead of thanking the Lord for the wonder of His creation, I was praying that I wouldn’t have bad dreams about being smothered by a horde of cockleburs and discovered by friends in an open grave somewhere in the wilderness. “Poor, ol’ David, darned fool. He got caught in a cocklebur patch, and never found his way out.”
Retreating was bad because I would have to retrace my path through Cocklebur Central. But going forward was worse, not knowing exactly how much further I had till I would be in the cleared field on the other side. So, backpedal I did, all the while mumbling to God concerning this particular creation of His.
A man named George de Mestral had the same problem I had, only worse because he went hiking with his dog, so not only did the pesky cockleburs attach themselves to his trousers but to his mutt as well. It was 1941 in Switzerland. De Mestral was an engineer, and one of those kinds of persons who likes to ask questions, and the question he asked that day as he was pulling cockleburs off himself and his dog, was, “How do these cockleburs naturally attach themselves to material so that it’s next to impossible to pull them off? What is the hook and latch arrangement in them?”
He pondered that as he made his way down the mountain, and then when he got home, he put a cocklebur under the microscope, and voila, invented something he called Velcro, a combination of the words “velvet” and “crochet.” He successfully reproduced the natural attachment with two strips of fabric, one with thousands of tiny hooks and another with thousands of tiny loops. Of course, it wasn’t easy. It took him nearly fourteen years of hard work before he had a patent and manufacturing process. It would be twenty years before the idea took off as a moneymaker, the big financial break coming when NASA utilized the Velcro system for astronauts.
At one point, de Mestral was ready to give up. He couldn’t figure out how to duplicate the process of hook and latch for production. He needed a machine to cut the nylon hooks in the uniform fashion he envisioned. While he was waiting in a barbershop, the pieces fell together (or should I say, hooked together) for him. Suddenly it was clear: he would create a machine that would simulate the cutting motion of barber shears and thus cut uniformly the nylon hooks he was looking for.
Henry Miller, the American author, said, “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself.”
Where I saw only a nuisance, de Mestral saw Velcro, though not all at once. But it began with looking at God’s creation with a sense of mystery, rather than frustration, a reverence that evokes silence, a sense of awe in the presence of God’s wonderfully magnificent world—even when it’s pulling one more cocklebur from your trousers.