On an overcast day, I sat on a step by my family’s deck, looking out at the tree line past the roofs of nearby houses. I’d been sitting there for a while when I looked down to my right and saw a bird sitting on the step next to me. It looked like a sparrow, with brown and white feathers and beady black eyes. It stared up at me, and I stared back at it. After our staring contest had gone on for a long time, I got up slowly and walked up the steps to look at it from a different angle, wondering if it might be hurt or relieving itself. All of a sudden, my step-mate pumped its little wings and took off like a dart, flying away across our backyard. I returned to the step and sat down again, amazed. What had made this bird sit next to me for so long when it could’ve left at any moment?
The weirdness wasn’t done yet. A couple minutes later, a bright green hummingbird flew up, hovered a short distance from my face, and then zipped past. Shortly after that, another brown-and-white bird (or maybe the same one I’d met earlier) flew over and landed on a post of the deck railing a few feet away. It waited there for a bit and then took off. In the span of a few minutes, I’d been repeatedly up close with critters who normally wouldn’t dare to get anywhere near me. Having one of these encounters was really cool. Having two of them back-to-back was amazing. Having three of them was suspicious, like maybe I was being investigated by the bird mafia. Wonderstruck, I breathed out a prayer. “Thank you, God. That was magic.”
Last year, my family moved from the suburban house that we were renting to a place of our own in the countryside of Caledonia, Michigan. While our neighborhood still looks and feels pretty suburban, it’s smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. The land around us is a sea of corn fields and cow pastures, where farms and roads and roadkill are the only signs of human life. Sometimes, when you step outdoors, you can catch the smell of manure in the wind. Some aspects of life in this new place have been challenging to adjust to. I miss the bustle of city life and the community that I was part of at college. I’ve struggled to feel content where I’m at. But sitting on that step, I caught an unexpected glimpse of beauty in my neighborhood, and it blew me away.
It wasn’t an isolated incident. Over the past couple months at our new home, I’ve been repeatedly surprised by moments of beauty in the outdoors that have stopped me in my tracks. Maybe to you folks who have grown up in the countryside, this stuff is normal, like breakfast cereal. But to someone like me who has only ever lived in the suburbs and the city, it was wild, like breakfast cereal covered in hot sauce. There was the time when I went for a walk and came across a doe and her two fawns in a wheat field. For a few magical moments, they were oblivious to my presence, and I watched one of the fawns scampering in circles around its mother on wobbly legs. There was the time when I walked by the same spot at night and saw the whole field lit up by dozens and dozens of fireflies. There was the time when I looked out of a truck window on a highway bridge and saw sunlight washing across a field like a wave from the sea. And then there was Wednesday evening, when I watched dark storm clouds rumbling into town and then saw a blazing bolt of lightning slice open the sky on the horizon.
As I thought about these experiences, I was reminded of some passages in G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (Which, if you haven’t read it yet, you need to check out pronto). Chesterton was a stout Catholic philosopher with a crackling wit who had a way of getting you to stop and think about seemingly ordinary stuff in ways you never had before. Orthodoxy is his most famous work, and in one part of the book, he writes about the power that children’s stories have to wake us up to the magic of the ordinary:
…we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales; we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough…These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
Chesterton’s onto something here. It’s so easy to allow truly magical things to become mundane and uninteresting. It’s easy for me to say “Wow!” when I catch a glimpse of soaring mountain peaks, crashing ocean waves, or yawning canyons. These things are pretty rare sights in my neck of the woods (As close as Lake Michigan may come to an ocean, it ain’t the real deal). But it’s a lot harder to be wowed by dirt, or grass, or a stick, or a bird. I see this stuff all the time, and often I’m in such a rush to get somewhere that I miss noticing them altogether. Chesterton’s words and the moments of beauty that have recently taken me by surprise have reminded me that the landscape I see around me is no less magical, no less worthy of my wonder, than the big stuff that I see only on rare occasions. I’m surrounded by ecosystems, clouds, sunlight, waters, and winds that make my daily survival possible, that provide me with food, water, clean air, and a place to call home. I’m surrounded by plants, bugs, and woodland creatures whose inner workings are total mysteries to me (Maybe not as much to you biology majors. I majored in the social sciences, so…)
According to the Christian Bible, the natural world isn’t just a mechanical backdrop for human activity that God set up and then left to do its own thing. The environment around us is full of God’s presence. Its workings are continually sustained by the Creator. Colossians 1:16-17 says this about Jesus Christ: “For by him all things were created, in heaven and earth…all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” According to Psalm 104, God takes it upon himself to make sure that the creatures of the earth are provided for: “You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth and wine to gladden the heart of man…Here is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great…These all look to you, to give them their food in due season “(Psalm 104: 14, 25, 27). Every provision that happens in nature, whether it’s a bee pollinating a flower, a lion dragging down a gazelle, or a robin snagging a worm on your front lawn, is enabled by the Creator’s loving hand. God is intimately attuned to and involved in every beautiful thing that happens in our environment, no matter how small it seems.
And while the things we see happening outdoors every day may seem monotonous and inevitable, they shouldn’t. Rather than allowing himself to be bored by the repetition that he saw in nature, G.K. Chesterton marveled at it, seeing it as evidence of God’s continual, creative action:
It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.
God never created a single thing out of necessity. Everything we see around us is the purposeful handicraft of an artist whose motive is self-giving love. All of creation, right down to the dirt and dust and dandelions, is a hymn that God is composing to tell us about himself. Psalm 19:1 says: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” Creation doesn’t just tell us that God is powerful and in control. It also tells us that the maker of whales, thunder, and galaxies loves us, that he’s looking out for us, and that he wants us to experience joy as we explore the beauty of the world that he’s made. Each beautiful part of nature that we experience is, at bottom, a love letter from God to us. Singer-songwriter Rich Mullins captured this idea really well in his song “Pictures in the Sky”:
Lord Jesus, you are the one
Who made the heavens
You’ll take me there someday
But until that time they’ll hang around
To say that you love me
We live in a world that, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, is “charged with the grandeur of the glory of God.” Every once in a while, we’re confronted by startling beauty that wallops us and takes our breath away. Nature isn’t passive or tame. It’s full of beauty ninjas – sunsets and fireflies and lightning bolts and millions of other things – that are designed by God to sneak up on us and sucker-punch us into gratitude when we least expect it. In her book Gilead, author Marilynne Robinson writes: “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.”
Ultimately, at the end of time, the Bible says that the world we call home is going to pass away. Because of this reality, we can’t get too comfortable here or make the stuff of this planet – whether that stuff is money and possessions, romantic relationships, temporary pleasures, achievements, or political causes – our ultimate end-goal. We were made for something deeper and richer than these things: a relationship of intimacy with the God of the universe. However, the scriptures also tell us that the things we experience on our planet are good gifts from God, and that God plans to create a new heavens and a new earth – not some trippy, immaterial paradise in the clouds, but a real, physical world of soil and stone and sea and sky, healed of all the evil and sickness and destruction that have ravaged it. The beauty that we witness all around us on this earth is a signpost that points us toward that far green country, and toward the King who waits for us there. While we await the kingdom that is coming, we can fulfill the sacred task of noticing the beauty that God has made and giving him thanks for it. Who knows? A love letter from God might be sitting right next to us, covered in feathers.
Words for Wayfarers 