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Writer's picturejohnvansloten

My Granddaughter (the Scientist)


"Who wouldn’t want to work in a lab with someone who loves Pikachu?”


My wife was commenting on the personalized name tag we’d just made to accompany our granddaughter’s 6th birthday gift (“70 Science Experiments!”).


And what’s really cool is how this gift idea came to be.


A month ago, I was driving my granddaughter to our afternoon swim date. Having just spent the morning editing my faith and science book, I started to see connections between her nature and all the scientific minds I had written about. She already knows the proper name of so many things (and regularly corrects me if I get it wrong). When I ask her how something works, she usually surprises me with a plausible hypothesis. And rarely, when I ask these kinds of questions, will she blurt out a quick response. I can see her face right now, getting lost in her thoughts, gathering the data, trying to figure it out. And writing lists… all she does is write lists!


Noticing her empirical sensibilities I said, “I love the way you think. You remind me of all the scientists I talk to at work. You think like they do. That way of thinking is so good for figuring out how the world works. Maybe you’re going to be a scientist one day.”


A week earlier she was all set to be a firefighter because its starts with the letter ‘F’ (like her first name), but after our little conversation she let me know that she’d already been thinking about being a scientist.


All I could do was smile in response… in part at her precocious prescience, but mostly with a deep sense of gratitude at how what I’d learned in writing my book (helping all those scientists see just how much they imaged the empirical mind of God) enabled me to call out something so beautiful in my own granddaughter!

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