The wonder of pi.....

Today is international pi day. I love pi day. It's like a celebration of all that is beautiful about curves and circles. You can find pi in the most unexpected of places. Every pi day I have to listen to the pi song. It tells the story of the discovery of pi. Some of the lyrics go like this:

'...... The question resting on the Grecian hearts was what is the circumference of a circle.
But they were set on rational numbers, it ranks among their biggest blunders.....' 

And then goes on to talk of the light bulb moment when 'irrationality was realised' (irrational numbers can't be written as fractions making maths more difficult) - that 'something deep within them died' when they discovered pi. 

But without pi there would be no circles..... The earth would be flat........  Tides wouldn't work....... We couldn't describe sound or microwaves......

So the Greeks - they had to be challenged - they had to be stripped down to basics to understand this new and different concept. They had to dream dreams different to anything they had before as they discovered something new and life changing about God's creation.

If they had continued with what was comfortable and easy (fractions - yes they are!) And not had this desire to discover - to move forward - then their work would have been lacking. They stopped, were challenged, explored and transformed.

To believe in irrational numbers there had to be a step of faith.

As we get on with the every day and run from place to place without stopping it's too easy to avoid the potential for challenge, the potential to confront our biggest fears, the potential that God might show us something new.

(I learnt today that there is an approximation for pi of 3 in the Bible..... It doesn't mention pi but mentions the dimensions of a circle, which would work if pi was rounded to 3 - see 1 Kings 7: 23-24 or if we do a bit more maths it actually gets approx 3.14 https://www.purplemath.com/modules/bibleval.htm - how cool is that!)

Just to note - we're not really sure who discovered pi, but God created it...!