Emily Uhl

Miss Uhl graduated from Grand Valley State University and has taught at NPC since the fall of 2019. She loves teaching any and all sciences, although biology and anatomy are her favorites. Miss Uhl has lived in Grand Rapids her entire life. She currently lives with 2 lizards, a dog, and a turtle.

To study science is to study the magnificence and complexity of God’s creation. Yes, it reveals His unimaginable power, and its precision tells of His greatness, but it also shows the love He has for His creation. An entire living organism is able to move, speak, and live because of its DNA. If you think of DNA as a cookbook, it contains all of the recipes necessary for making the necessary cells and cell parts. Inside of a cell, this cookbook is copied two trillion times a day. If one letter, one measurement is changed, the correct cell part is not made and the cell cannot function. Yet God, in His infinite wisdom, has created special guards to check the DNA after each copy and special repairmen to fix any changes that may occur in the recipe. He did not send out His creation to live alone and succumb to errors and failures; instead, God has taken great care of His finite creation to ensure their ability to survive and thrive within the universe God has formed. Although we talk about this in the physical sense, the truth applies also to our emotional and spiritual health. God did not mean for His people to be alone and separate from Him because of their sin; instead, God has so much love for His creation that He sacrificed His Son to be the atonement for those evil deeds, and He has promised to never leave us.

In Psalm 19, David sings that “The Heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” God’s creation involves each trophic level of an ecosystem from the top-of-the-food-chain carnivore to the deep decomposers who do the dirty work (literally). Understanding how the living and nonliving components of an ecosystem work together for the survival of each population allows us to specifically praise God as our Creator. I will demonstrate how to be a good steward of the natural world and its resources.

In addition to this, I will show students that because we are made in God’s image, we should therefore reflect His attributes to others. This includes loving others just as Jesus has loved us (John 13:34). The same verse tells of how this sacrificial love will be what sets Christians apart from others. This love is not simply doing the polite or kind things that are normally expected of us; that would then blend in with unbelievers! This command tasks us with going further and loving when it is not expected nor convenient to do so. This holds especially true for the study of medicine or sustainability. Controversy covers these two sciences, often getting in the way of its progression. However, advances to biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and genetic engineering have cured those thought to be incurable, fed those who were deemed a lost cause, and have eradicated diseases that only plagued the outcasts of society. In my class, we will study these case studies and reveal how compassion drove science to love the hurting, even if it meant taking on a global problem.

It would be useless for my class to learn the wonders of God’s love and the great care He took in creating our world if we did not disseminate our findings. Through hands-on inquiry, my students will develop a fervor that will not be contained and will be too excited to not share what they have learned. I will have my students create environmental plans to improve their stewardship of God’s natural resources. Anatomy students will reveal how commercial products aim to devalue the magnificence that is a human being.