The web I would have woven

I was talking to someone recently about my quest to learn to run. I have finally, after literally months and months of trying, starting making progress.

I mean like miles and timing myself and everything.

My sister suggested I run a 5K. I went to the website, thought about registering and freaked out.

She suggested that I run a different race in February.

I agreed.

I'm now signed up to run a race in March.

I'm procrastinating.

Part of the problem is that I really do try to "train" in the mornings, but my main goal for being out there every morning isn't actually to exercise. It's more of a prayer closet for me to go into by myself.

Alone time is hard to come by in this house of early risers.

They can't exercise with me, so this became my place to pray and process and talk and argue and learn and cry and worship and wrestle. I wish I knew how many miles I have logged over the years doing this each morning.

I do know I have grown a lot. Praise the Father for that.

In trying to explain all of this to a friend recently, I told her that I do try to run well in the mornings, but I am just as apt to stop to study a bird, take a picture of some clouds or a dandelion, study a bug or random creeping creature or just stop to feel the sun on my face.

It's hard to be serious about timing yourself when all of this is going on.

I recently found these verses in Proverbs 24 and they reminded me of my mornings out in nature:

I passed by the field of the sluggard

  And by the vineyard of the man lacking sense,

And behold, it was completely overgrown with thistles;
  Its surface was covered with nettles,
  And its stone wall was broken down.

When I saw, I reflected upon it;
  I looked, and received instruction.

“A little sleep, a little slumber,
  A little folding of the hands to rest,”

Then your poverty will come as a robber
  And your want like an armed man.

First of all, I'm not out judging my neighbors' yards or calling them "sluggards." But I do so often see something on my "run" and literally learn something right there on the spot. And I am very thankful for this.

One morning I was really wrestling with God's apparent plan for my life at the moment. I was trying to hard to accept this path that He has me on and trust Him.

And I was failing miserably.

We've been here before. God in His infinite patience has walked this road with me more times that I can recount in the recent years. As hard as I try to rest in Him and accept and trust, I usually end up stomping my foot and demanding my way.

This particular morning, I ran past a huge spider web. I kept going but the Lord called me back.

Look at it. Look at the web. Study it...

I did. In wonder and amazement. The morning light reflected off each tiny silk thread and perfectly showed the intricacies and complexity of the design. I ran off and thought a lot about that web. It was a marvelous miracle.

"Now, Lord. Back to my whining..."

The very next day I was running again and lo and behold, I ran past another web. I stopped again and the Lord again pressed upon my heart the urge to study it. I did and even took a few pictures. As I ran off, I uneasily waited for God to show me why I had stopped and studied webs two days in a row in the great classroom of God called nature.

I didn't have to wait long. Out of a swirling presence that reminded me of Job 40, the Lord began asking me one question after another:

Amy, how does that spider know how to spin that web?

Does he pause before he spins each one and ponder whether there might be a better pattern to spin than the one that he instinctively knows how to spin?

Does he try to spin his own version of a web?

Or better yet has he decided after all this time of catching food this way that there is probably a better way to find his dinner?

Does he doubt the One who created the web? Or does he just spin the way he was created to spin?

Does he ever tell Me that his webs aren't good enough and he would rather have some different webs?

Does that spider do what I created him to do?

With each strike of my foot against the pavement and with each question ringing in my heart, I knew that what I was really telling God was that He didn't know what He was doing. I was much more able to plan out my life than He was and as a matter of fact, He had been doing a really terrible job of it all. I could do much better.

Yes, Proverbs, this is called receiving instruction. 



 

I thought again of these things I learned as I drove home today.

There was a time when I carefully constructed every thread of my own life. I controlled and planned and structured everything that was in my control and fretted and worried about what was out of my control.

This was true even as we as a family started out to find a new church, years ago. I had my list and set out to find a church that fit that list.

There was one church in particular that I wanted to visit and I told my husband repeatedly that I didn't want to join, I just wanted to visit. Emphatically, "Not join, just visit. Once." So we did.

Visit.

And that was five years ago tomorrow.

I sat in the floor of a living room today eating lunch with friends that I met at this church. As I reflected on all that God has done in my life these last five years, all the friends He has blessed me with, the way He has grown me, the love and faithfulness and the care He has shown me, I heard the inevitable question...

What if you had gotten your way?

My way would have been a different church.

That was sort of hard to imagine, sitting in the floor of that living room today.

As I ponder the path that God seems to have for me at the moment, I know that He only makes good decisions. I know that He makes no mistakes. No matter how I feel or what I want or how I'd do things, all that matters is that I'm okay with how He's doing things.

My choice of church would have me in a completely different world now. I wiped away tears today as I thought of the people both near and far that I would have missed out on knowing had I had my way. I think of all the blessings I would have missed out on.

This can only serve to reassure me that He does indeed know what He's doing. As He knows the best web for that spider to spin, He knows the best plan for my life. Today looked just exactly has He had always planned it would. Same for tomorrow and the day after that and all the days that will follow.

We do in fact gain trust in His faithfulness when we look back and see all that He has done. I work hard to trust Him as I look forward. This is my challenge. Trust.

Trust for tomorrow.

And the days after that.

And stop spinning my own webs. They never turn out as good as His. 

Time looms large...

 I was running today, trying to sort out my heart.

Not an easy job.

The running or the sorting.

It seems harder today. Here lately. Most recently. Harder than it ever has been. 

Sorting out my heart. Not the running. 

The new year. Full of time. Unknown and unsorted time. 

Time looms large...

As I was cooling down, I walked under one of my favorite trees. I looked up a lot at the sky today, for a lot of reasons I'm sure. One reason was the absence of my beloved clouds. After what seems like a dark and gloomy winter so far, it felt good to see the nearly cloudless blue sky. 

But my poor tree. 

It looks like this in the spring:

I felt so encouraged this past spring. So hopeful. I quickly made this picture into a screen saver.

{I do love me some cheese}

But I believed it. I felt it. It was spring and everything was new and happy and so...

promising

This is my beloved tree today: 

I mean, it's just sad. It looks prettier here than it really is. It's... 

dead

Or it looks dead.

I feel like that tree.

Sort of dead inside. The hope is dead. The fire is dead. I feel like a hibernating animal, burrowed deeply in the snow, tucked in, waiting for spring. 

And I love winter. This isn't about the season. It's about me.

Hope has flickered out.

And I spent my run trying to figure out why. 

I have way too much in my life to be thankful for to be morose about anything. 

I know that. 

I think this really is about death. Not real, physical death. The other kind.

I learned a lot about this from Elisabeth Elliot. And she learned a lot about this from Lilias Trotter. 

In nature, so much of the beauty and growth depends on dying. The dying and falling off of the bloom. The dying and falling of the fruit. Nature is full of this dying and blooming and dying and blooming.

You can even look at a branch on a tree and see how many cycles of this kind that the branch has cycled through. 

There is a knot at each place where it died and grew again.

I feel that deeply in my soul. Each time the Lord has pruned me, something in me has died. Thankfully it's most always something that needed to go: a deeper grasp on pride or judgement of others, a level of fear and anxiety, a removal of something temporal I cling to instead of Him, my instance of getting my way... The list could go on and on. 

These things, and more, need to go. And I see that He works all things in my life together to bring about this sanctification. The knots stay and I remember. I remember each time the Lord wrestled from my childish, selfish grasp; something that needed to go. And I'm thankful. 

And that's good.

But sometimes I also lose something valuable. Something precious. I lose hope. I lose trust. I lose my way just a little. I feel a tiny bit like Job, 

Though you slay me...

(Lilias Trotter says, "“Do not be dismayed if the first answer to some of your prayers is a revelation, not of the power of God to make alive, but of his might to slay every hope outside himself.”)

And that's what I feel today. I feel a little lost. And definitely without hope. I feel a little slayed. 

So I made a new cheesy screensaver:

Because it's true. No matter whether I can see what He's doing or feel correctly about anything He's doing or whether or not I can actively trust Him, He's still faithful. And I know that there is much more to this verse and much more to do and think and feel, but...

I know all the right things to think and say. But for now when I feel a little lost and a little alone and a little scared about how He keeps pushing me forward when I'm really tired and just want to rest for awhile, it's good to know that He's still faithful. 

I guess my tree and I are both getting ready for spring. 

Gardenias

Gardenias are my favorite.

Actually I have several favorite flowers, just as I have several favorite children, and gardenias are definitely one of them.

I only tried to grow them once. And I failed miserably. As such, I am reduced to sniffing the neighbor's gardenias, and I do this unabashedly.

(They haven't called the police on me yet, so I'll continue...)

I hadn't noticed them blooming yet until one morning last week. They were blooming near the house on the corner of the block where I walk. I noticed them, and made no haste going over and burying my face in them.

I breathed deeply over and over again. Their scent fills me with such joy.

A friend used to have a ginormous bush in her yard, and she allowed me not only to sniff them, but to also cut branches to take home. I'd put them in my window sill in the kitchen, where I seem to spend most of my time, and smell them until they finally withered.

Then I would go get more.

I really love gardenias.

It was such a treat to find them for the first time this season. I wondered how long they had been there before I noticed them.

And then a strange thing happened.

Their scent is noticeable from the street. After pausing to plunge my face into their fragrance that morning, now each time I pass the yard, I can smell them. And I couldn't before. Now that I got re-acquainted with their smell, I can recognize it from a far. And even today, almost a week, later as I passed, I could smell them from where I walked on the street.

But I couldn't before.

The Spiritual truth was poignant.

I am currently obsessed with 1 Kings 19. It's become my favorite chapter in the Bible.

Okay, so I have several favorite chapters.  (I am sensing a theme here.) And this has become one of them.

1 Kings 19:11-12

So He said, "Go forth and stand on the mountain before the LORD." And behold, the LORD was passing by! And a great and strong wind was rending the mountains and breaking in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of a gentle blowing.


...a gentle blowing...

God revealed Himself in the gentle blowing of the wind.

When is the last time I stopped to listen to the sound of a gentle blowing?

A wind that whips around the house, shaking it to the foundation?

Yes.

A gentle wind?

Not so much.

Yet I want to spend time with the Lord, breathing deeply of Him and His fragrance so that when the scent of Him floats across the wind, I will sense Him and respond.

Our pastor has said that "God does not reveal the intimate things of His heart to those who casually come and go." I want to visit Him in prayer and in His Word and in worship and linger there. I want to be quiet and still and hear loudly the gentle wind that He is.

Wrathful and holy and mighty and strong and fierce, yet gentle too...

My commentary paraphrases the Lord's message to Elijah by saying, "My still small voice brings the Word to the listening ear and heart. Yes, there's a time and place for the wind, the earthquake and the fire, but most of the time, I speak to people in tones of gentle love and quiet persuasion."

Am I still and quiet enough to hear?

What if I hadn't stopped by that gardenia bush that day? Would I enjoy smelling it each day as I run by? What would I have missed out on if I hadn't stopped?

What am I missing by rushing past the Lord to meet my own needs and wants?

What do I risk for a lost and dying world that so desperately needs Him?

Oh, 2 Corinthians 2:15:

For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing...


I am desperate to spend Him with Him so that His presence is all over me, inside and out, filling me so that it spills out of me and flows to a world that needs to see Him in me and hear His truth from my mouth.

As those flowers send their scent on the wind, I pray that He sends His out of me.

The Lord has shown me afresh that He is all I need. Spending time with Him, both in concentrated study and fellowship with Him in His Word and communing with him through prayer and worship, are the things what will nourish and sustain me.

And pour His scent over me.

And while I am obsessed with Elijah, I remembered the time he sat by his brook waiting on the Lord. Why? To ready him for what was to come.

I am glad to wait by my brook today. For however long He chooses.

To wait well.

And while waiting, what a joy to experience the fragrance of Him in the gentle wind.

Job and the Dandelion

The year 2011 was rapidly coming to a close. I was catching up on my blog reading one day, innocently lingering, enjoying the last of the break from school the holidays had to offer. There were posts full of yearly Bible reading plan recommendations, and I skimmed them rather absentmindedly until I heard the unmistakable nudging of the Spirit, "Which one would you like to do?"

Oh boy. 

I have studied the Old Testament ad nauseum and was really enjoying the time I was spending in the New Testament. 

But I knew what this meant. I needed to just do it. Obey.

Coincidentally, after a bit of research,  I chose a plan very similar to the one our church used to walk through the Bible chronologically year before last. I admit to having heart palpitations at seeing the reading plan again. As much as I am a type A/OCD person, and probably other letters that indicate further neurosis, as soon as I am saddled with a schedule, I tend to rebel. 

This is a large portion of my charm, I am sure. 

Part of me dreaded starting over again. I especially hated the thought of committing to a "plan."

 Then I decided for once in my recent past to just obey. So January 1, I flung myself into Genesis 1. 

And of course I was blessed. I learned and meditated and worshiped and thanked God at how He provides for me. 

He knew I needed this. 

I knew what was coming, though. Since this was a chronological plan, Job was coming after Genesis. And I'm going to be honest: I didn't feel up to studying Job. 

Even though the book of Job starts well and ends well, Job spends the majority of the book in a trash pile covered in ash and dirt.

And though I fully acknowledge my tendency towards being a drama queen, I feel like I've been sitting in my own pile of trash and ashes for a bit. 

And I wasn't sure I felt up to visiting Job in his.

I want to make very clear that I'm not equating my life with Job's. 

He lost everything. I have not. 

I do think that this book underscores and very clearly illustrates a believer's struggles with God. Trust through suffering. Dealing well with the difficulties of life while struggling with God. The unseen that goes on around us that we are completely unaware of yet figures significantly in our struggles. 

Did I say trust?

Oh yes. Okay. 

Trusting God. 

Nevertheless, Job came after Genesis on that blasted reading plan, so I plunged in, very nearly holding my breath. 

Oh, Job. 

I get teary at the mention of your name. I ache for you. It's not just that you lost. You lost nearly everything. I can't comprehend the magnitude of the loss you experienced. It nearly takes me outside of myself. 

source

I stared at this picture for a long time. I needed to grieve with Job, as strange as that sounds. 

I'm convinced that quick readings of the Old Testament deprive us of the depth of the teachings that it offers. These were real people who struggled in ways that most of us never will. To barrel through texts for the sake of checking off a daily reading plan will never teach us all that God intended for us to learn through His Word. We must linger over texts, sinking deeply into the stories, spending time with the people there. 

Maybe this is why I dislike those reading plans. And maybe it's why I'm decidedly far behind and it's only March. 

Anyway. 

Oh, Job. You lost it all. You crawled to a trash dump outside the city. You turned your face to the heavens and looked to the One who was supposed to care for you and provide for you and be faithful to you always and you asked, "Why?"

Haven't we done that? 

One doesn't have to go far to identify with Job. 

Haven't we all asked that singularly worded question?

Why?

I am convinced that you can be the most passionate and dedicated follower of Christ and still be taken to your knees in brokenness and pain and sob out to the Father, "Why?"

Why are you letting me suffer?

Why are you far away?

Don't you see?

Don't you care?

How is this best?

Why did you allow this path for me?

When will it end?

It's easier to read Job than to live our own lives because we know how it ends. You read the story with the benefit of knowing how it ends. If at any point you become overwhelmed with Job and his story, you can flip to the end of the book and see him restored. That's comforting.

But to visit Job in his trash heap, you feel his pain. It's palpable. 

I wept with him verse after verse. Chapter after chapter. I cannot see Job 13:15 through dry eyes:

Though He slay me, yet I will trust in Him.

And consider the last half of Job 23:

Behold, I go forward but He is not there,

         And backward, but I cannot perceive Him;

When He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him;

         He turns on the right, I cannot see Him.

But He knows the way I take;

         When He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold.

My foot has held fast to His path;

         I have kept His way and not turned aside.

I have not departed from the command of His lips;

         I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my necessary food.

But He is unique and who can turn Him?

         And what His soul desires, that He does.

For He performs what is appointed for me,

         And many such decrees are with Him.

Therefore, I would be dismayed at His presence;

         When I consider, I am terrified of Him.

It is God who has made my heart faint,

         And the Almighty who has dismayed me,

But I am not silenced by the darkness,

         Nor deep gloom which covers me.

I've been there. I am there. As I continue to walk in obedience to Him, feeling Him stretch me and push me and use me, I squirm under the pressure. I plod forward, face turn upward, trusting and studying and praising and worshiping and working and resisting the urge to do what comes naturally to me:

I plant my feet and scream into the wind, "What are you doing?" I point to all the wrong and incomplete in my life and in the midst of the storm and the wind and the raging waves, I plead for Him to move. 

Yet, He knows the way I take. 

I feel Job's pain as he pours himself out before God, angry. Hurt. Exhausted. He pours himself out defiantly, honestly.

And then my favorite. 

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind...

God answered all of Job's hurt and longing and pain and questions with more than sixty of His own.

These aren't my original words but they are true and I say them to myself a lot: In response to all of Job's questions, God only reveals Himself to Job. He doesn't answer Job's questions. He just reveals Himself.

Isn't that good? The Lord owes me nothing. He knows that if He gave me answers to my questions, I would only have more questions. The only things that satisfies me is Him. More of Him. The only thing that quiets the storm is Him. 

As God's questions start to flow from Him in chapter 38, I find it hard to breathe. Is He revealed anywhere in Scripture as clearly as He is here? Or is it just that my heart is so thirsty for Him after swimming in Job's pain for the proceeding 37 chapters? The tears stream reading question after question which evoke such worship. We are but nothing. "Behold, I am insignificant..."  He is all. 

Oh, the worship. 

I tried to picture Job's face. How quickly after God started speaking did his anger melt away? How quickly did he bury his face in the trash heap? Did he fall, prostrate? Did he regret questioning the Creator and sustainer of the universe?

And then God was done. 

And I love Job's response:

I know that You can do all things,

         And that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.

‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’

         Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand,

         Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.

‘Hear, now, and I will speak;

         I will ask You, and You instruct me.’

I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear;

         But now my eye sees You;

Therefore I retract,

         And I repent in dust and ashes.

But what kills me is that nothing had changed for Job at this point. His children were still dead. He was still destitute. Homeless. His wife was still devastated. He was still covered with the most heinous sores. He was still deathly ill. He was still sitting in a garbage dump. 

Nothing had changed.

Except his view of God.

I can't get past that. 

Nothing had changed. 

On the outside. 

I can't control my circumstances. I can't control the world around me. I can't control what comes, or what doesn't. I can't control death or sickness or disaster or catastrophe or heartache or pain or loss or hurt.

I can acknowledge Who God is. 

It was a long couple of weeks in Job. So, so many tears. So many struggles. So much trusting and desire to trust and prayers begging God to help me trust. 

And as I stepped into Exodus, I still thought of Job, in his trash heap, questioning God. And hearing God. 

I kept thinking of God's response. All those questions. "Do you see how perfectly I wove the universe? Do you see how how perfectly I created it? Do you think I am doing the same thing in your life?"

And why don't I see it? I see His perfection all around me. Yet in my own life, I think He's making colossal mistakes. Because He's not meeting my demands. My longings go unfulfilled. And it feels like it's killing me. 

I wrestle with this day after day. 

I walked one morning, again, pouring out my doubts and fears to an ever patient, ever present God.

I noticed a dandelion, nearly reaching out into the sidewalk in front of me, dancing in the breeze.

I stopped and dropped to the cold, damp sidewalk. 

It had been a long time since I had studied a dandelion. It's perfect. Perfectly spherical. Each light, delicate white fluff anchored in the most perfect interval. Soft and beautiful. I studied it in the morning light for a long time. 

And you know what? It's a weed. A nuisance. We dig them up, mow them down, douse them in chemicals and tell our children not to enjoy blowing them because they will wreck our pristine yards. 

A weed. 

Yet God took such care to make them perfect and beautiful.

How much more care is He taking care to craft my life just as perfectly?

Would I have continued on by that dandelion that morning had I not been thinking so deeply about Job? And God's questions to him? 

I don't know. I took pictures of that dandelion. I made a picture my screen saver on my phone so that every time I saw it I would hear God start out His questions for Job by saying, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?"

I still struggle. Daily. But I know there are truths in Job that I must choose to believe. And there is no way to read Job 38 - 42 without worshiping and submitting to Him. 

There is just no way.

So I go back there often. I think of Job in that trash heap. He stays there in my mind. And maybe someday I will think of him happy and restored. But for now, he's there. Trusting. And waiting. 

And I'm there too. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"He doesn't tell you how long this particular episode is going to last. And so? You and I trust Him. We trust HIM. We wait. We serve Him. We keep our feet on His paths. We treasure His Word, and whatever God desires, He does. We keep leaning on Him, even though we can't understand what He's up to."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Everything that happens, including the things you cannot explain or justify, is being women together like an enormous, beautiful piece of tapestry. From this earthly side, it seems blurred and knotted, strange and twisted. But from heave's perspective, it has an incredible pattern. But best of all, it is for His greater glory. Right now, it seems so confusing, but someday, the details will come together and make good sense."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"You couldn't piece it together if you tried. You aren't able to understand it and there will be times you won't like it. But as we're learning from Job, He's not going to ask your permission. And so? We trust God. Those who do that discover without trying to make it happen that they have begun to demonstrate grace under pressure." 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"The Lord was nailed to the cross; you can count on being nailed to the wall. It's helpful to see each ordeal that way - as being crucified with Christ... God gives us over to such bruisings because they are part of the process to make us what He intends us to be. The hurting makes us sweeter, more mellow, We lose the fear of losing out; we learn to let go of what we want. We're not so easily provoked to wrath by harm or reproof. We learn to absorb abuse without retaliation, to accept reproof without defensiveness, to return a soft answer to wrath. It makes us calm and strong." 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Leaves

by Elsie N. Brady

How silently they tumble down

And come to rest upon the ground

To lay a carpet, rich and rare,

Beneath the trees without a care,

Content to sleep, their work well done,

Colors gleaming in the sun.

At other times, they wildly fly

Until they nearly reach the sky.

Twisting, turning through the air

Till all the trees stand stark and bare.

Exhausted, drop to earth below

To wait, like children, for the snow.

 

I love and adore you, fall. You are my favorite. 

Eyes on the Sky

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

 For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.




The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.

When the mysterious author of Hebrews admonished his readers to run the race"...fixing our eyes on Jesus..." I sort of took that literally.

(and i'm feeling a little cranky about not knowing who wrote hebrews. it seems important today.)

I know that there are lots of ways to do that Scripturally and figuratively, and I've struggled to do those things. Keep your eyes on Him, I mean. 

I also stare at the sky a lot.

My mom has always said, "It feels good to let your eyes look as far as they can" and I agree.

Especially since I read about a prisoner that lost a lot of his vision from being in a small cell for years. 

But it's more than that. It's seeing God's creation screaming His praises. It's seeing that I am such a small speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. It's reminding myself that if I keep looking here, I'll get discouraged, weary and frustrated.

It's hard to feel those things when you're looking up. 

So I set my eyes upward, toward Him. It helps me praise Him, talk to Him, and see that He truly is sovereign over all. Especially my tiny, brief life. 

I also have become accustomed to snapping pictures of the sky with my phone. I have no idea why. I like capturing the beauty, I guess.

It's odd, though, just a bit, to be this fixated on the sky. And I'm sure the neighbors that exercise at the same time I do each morning wonder why I stop periodically and take pictures of the sky. 

That's okay, though.

I was delighted to hear our pastor mention the other Sunday that while walking across the parking lot to come into the church, he noticed the clouds, and proceeded to exclaim about their beauty and how they shouted God's glory.

"I get that!" I yelled on the inside.

That made me feel not quite so odd. 

At the risk of looking like one of those cheesy videos from You Tube, I had to put here some of my favorites. They make me happy. And peaceful. 

This was an amazing morning. This was literally what I saw facing one direction:

And when I turned around, this was the opposite direction:

And then in the fall, my favorite season, there's this; a perfectly cloudless sky, so blue you can hardly stop looking at it. That screams His glory too...

I'm so glad people are smarter than me

This is another one of those, "No really, I was about to blog that..." kind of posts. I blog in my head a lot, because that's how I process information. I'm sure that's not normal, but what about me is actually normal? I'm good with not being normal. 

So I was driving down 65 the other day, and this really great blog post just came together in my mind. The problem is that by the time I get to sit down to get it down, it's gone. (Jon Acuff posted an amazing video about this same subject not too long ago. I need to type out the part that has stayed in my heart, because it was just so poignant to me. I'll get to that also. Hopefully.) I didn't give up on my post, but I was just going to have to wait until I could get it to come together again. And then this morning I read this. (Man, I love Twitter.) Dr. Moore says it SO much better than I was going to, and since he's way smarter than I am and much more convincing in his argument, I'll just post his blog post and then later add the thoughts that are still spinning around in my head. *I added the italics, because that was the paragraph that made me want to stand up and cheer.

The Gulf of Mexico and the Care of Creation

— Saturday, May 1st, 2010 —

As I type this, I am looking out at the Gulf of Mexico. You could have seen a similar sight out the window of the hospital where I was born, just a few miles down the road here on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Now, though, those waters I grew up with, gently lapping against the sand, are threatening to bring with them millions of gallons of oil, spewing up from an exploded rig out in the Gulf. Five years after Hurricane Katrina leveled this hometown of mine, it is bracing for the worst environmental disaster in the history of the United States.

Some conservatives, and some conservative evangelicals, act as though “environmentalism” is by definition “liberal” or even just downright silly. Witness a lot of the evangelical rhetoric across social media on Earth Day a while back: mostly Al Gore jokes and wisecracks about cutting down trees or eating endangered species as a means of celebration.

Do some environmentalists reject the dignity of humanity? Yes. Do some replace the reverence for creation with that due the Creator? Of course. This happens in the same way some do the same thing with reverence for economic profit or any other finite thing.

There’s nothing conservative though, and nothing “evangelical,” about dismissing the conservation of the natural environment. And the accelerating Gulf crisis reminds us something of what’s at stake.

The incoming tsunami of oil isn’t just about the beaches, although that will be environmentally and economically catastrophic. Just as problematic is the creeping of the oil into the inland estuaries and marshes and waterways. The crisis could potentially destroy the eco-systems of birds, shrimp, oysters, and other lifeforms.

Does God care about baby shrimp? I would argue, yes; God cares for the sparrow that falls to the ground (Matt. 10:29). But, even if you disagree with me on that, consider how God loves those who are “of more value than many sparrows” (Matt. 10:30).

Shrimpers here in Biloxi are mourning the potential loss of more than just an industry but a way of life handed down, at least to some of them, from multiple generations before them. If shrimping collapses, so does tourism, apart from the in and out predation of the casinos dotting the shoreline.

Just as significant, though, are the ways the balance of ecology affects people in ways we never consider or notice, until it’s threatened. God gave his image-bearing humanity dominion over the natural creation (Gen. 1:28). But this isn’t a pharaoh-like dominion; it’s a Christ-like dominion. Humans aren’t made of ether; we’re made of Spirit-enlivened mud. We come from the earth, and we must receive from the earth what we need to survive, in the form of light from the sun, oxygen from plants, and food from the ground.

God knows that we need the natural creation (what we so reductionistically call an “environment”). He exults in it throughout the Psalms and in his speech to Job about his mysterious ways. Jesus continually retreats into the silent places of the mountains and the hills and the deserts, sometimes in the fellowship of only the wild beasts (Mark 1:13). We are built to recognize God in the creation (Rom. 1:18-21), and we need more than just what we can pave over and build in order to flourish.

This is why the Scriptures speak of eternal life in the metaphor of a river that causes the waters to teem with life, with many kind of fish, and vegetation thriving on the banks (Ezek. 47:9-12). This is why one aspect of Jesus’ kingship is to make the waters teem with fish, right in the presence of his commercial fishermen disciples (John 21:3-8), And this is why the Scriptures consider it an apocalypse when the waters are poisoned, and the sea-life is gone (Rev. 8:8-9).

We need the creation around us, including the waters and all they contain, because we are not gods. We are creatures who thrive when we live as we were made to live. We exercise dominion over the creation not only when we use it, but also when we conserve it for the generations who will come after.

So pray for the Gulf Coast, that the oil wouldn’t devastate a people and a land already devastated by so much. As you do, remember: real conservatives protect what God loves.

http://www.russellmoore.com/2010/05/01/the-gulf-of-mexico-and-the-care-of-creation/

Storm 4-19-09