George Washington Carver and the Praise Hidden in a Peanut

George Washington Carver rose before dawn nearly every morning at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, slipping into the woods while the campus still slept. He called these walks his conversations with the Creator. "I ask the Great One what the universe was made for," Carver once told a reporter, "and He tells me to ask something more in keeping with my little mind."

So Carver asked about the peanut. And the Almighty answered — not in thunder, but through the quiet architecture of a legume. Carver eventually discovered over three hundred uses for the peanut, from dyes to plastics to milk substitutes. He saw in every shell a hymn, in every root nodule a declaration of divine ingenuity. When called before the United States Congress in 1921, he credited none of it to his own brilliance. "God has merely permitted me to peep into His laboratory," he said.

This is the vision of Psalm 148. The psalmist does not simply invite people to praise the Most High — he calls on sea creatures and ocean depths, fire and hail, mountains and cedars, wild animals and cattle. Creation is already singing. The frost on a January fence post, the double helix coiled in every cell, the stubborn green shoot cracking pavement — all of it testifies.

Carver understood that the scientist's microscope and the psalmist's song point to the same truth: everything that exists was made to glorify its Maker.