From the last post: “My purposes are not for my comfort, or yours.  My purposes are always and only an expression of love . . . what you see as chaos, I see as a fractal” (Young*, 191).

I was leading a group that was using Young’s book The Shack as the focus for our meetings for several weeks.  When we came to this part of the text most of us in the group looked at each other with glances that implied that we had knowledge of fractals.  As it turned out, one of the members of the group actually did have such knowledge.  A retired professor of mathematics, he taught us about fractals.  The following week he brought Benoit B. Mandelbrot’s book The Fractal Geometry of Nature to our meeting and continued to enrich our education and understanding.  A copy of Mandelbrot’s book is now a valued part of my personal library.  His concepts are still completely beyond my comprehension, but I love the wonderful pictures that are throughout the book.

Following is some information about fractals that I utilized in the preparation of a recent musical meditation for people in recovery:

The term fractal was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning “broken” or “fractured.”

A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion.

A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,” a property called self-similarity. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal)

 I encourage each reader to visit the following website – http://webecoist.com/2008/09/07/17-amazing-examples-of-fractals-in-nature/ .  I am confident that you will be amazed and also learn some more about fractals.

My prayer is that when we perceive chaos in nature that we remember that God the Creator has and continues to create marvelous examples of fractals.

*Young, William P.  The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity.  Los Angeles:  Windlown Media, 2007.