The Tide Pool at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

On a fog-laced morning in Moss Beach, California, a kindergarten class crouches around a tide pool at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. Their teacher points to a purple sea urchin, and twenty small voices gasp. Then someone spots an ochre sea star. Then a hermit crab shuffling between anemones. Then a sculpin darting beneath a curtain of kelp. Every few seconds, another creature reveals itself in that single pool no wider than a bathtub.

What stuns the adults standing behind them is the math. Marine biologists estimate that one healthy tide pool can sustain over 150 species — each one feeding, sheltering, and signaling to the others in a web so precise that removing a single species can unravel the whole community. And this is just one pool. There are thousands along that coastline alone.

The psalmist looked out at the same Pacific — or its ancient equivalent — and wrote, "How many are your works, LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures." He saw the teeming sea, the creatures beyond counting, and he understood that none of them feed themselves. They all "look to you to give them their food at the proper time." Every opened hand of the Almighty fills them with good things. Every breath they draw comes because His Spirit sustains it.

The only fitting response, the psalmist decided, was the one those kindergartners already knew by instinct: wonder, and then praise.