Unexpected Answers

illustration by Viktor Miller-Gausa

Dale Mason
Publisher

I must admit I’m a bit jealous of bears—those hairy, lumbering lugs of the forest. For one thing, everyone respects them (or they come to realize they should). Even when a big brown bear of the northern woods is at his maximum annual bulk, none of his buddies points a paw at him and says, “Dude, you’re fat!” That’s because bears are designed to stay sufficiently fit just by doing what they normally do. They simply stroll from honeycomb to berry patch to salmon stream, snacking on roots, termites, and grubs along the way. No car payment, no midterm exams, no one telling them to shovel the snow. From time to time, they snag a small animal or do an all-out sprint just fast enough to secure a feast of venison for an evening.

Amazingly, bears are designed to be able to add a big pot belly every fall by gorging themselves in preparation for hibernation. Then, after napping all winter, they emerge from their dens in the spring with a swimsuit-ready body.

Bears are cool, but they’re not the pinnacle of God’s creation. Humans are. While humans have to balance calisthenics and calories in a way that animals do not, mankind is made in God’s image, and we enjoy great variation in lifestyle choices. And for us, food and exercise vary depending on whether we type weightless sentences onto a computer screen or shovel thousands of pounds of soil and rock for a landscaping project.

God designed his creation with great variety. And we have designed Answers magazine with great variety too. Enjoy the creation and culture articles you expect to find here, but don’t miss the topics that might just be unexpected.