The Word Written in Wood

Walk into any forest in October and pick up an acorn. Hold it in your palm — it weighs almost nothing. Yet inside that small, unremarkable shell lives the complete blueprint for a white oak tree that could stand for three hundred years, grow sixty feet tall, and shelter ten thousand creatures. Every detail is already written there: the pattern of the bark, the shape of each leaf, the architecture of branches that will one day cast shade over your grandchildren's grandchildren.

Scientists call this encoded biological information. Ancient Greek philosophers might have called it a kind of logos — a word, a reason, a shaping intelligence compressed into something you can hold with two fingers.

John opens his Gospel not with a manger scene but with a cosmic declaration: "In the beginning was the Word." The Logos — not merely language, but the organizing Reason behind all creation. This Word was with God. This Word was God. And through this Word, every acorn, every galaxy, every human heartbeat came to be.

Then comes the staggering pivot: "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us."

The divine Logos — the very Intelligence by which the Almighty spoke the universe into being — did not send a memo. He came. The eternal encoded Himself in bone and blood, in hunger and laughter, in calloused carpenter's hands. The blueprint became a body. And those who lived alongside Him described what they witnessed: glory, grace, and truth.