See This? I Made It All for You!

 

For years, I’ve been writing about Nature and of the many wonders it holds for those who take the time to notice and appreciate them. Birds, plants, forests and fields, valleys and mountains...lakes, rivers and oceans...the soil we walk on, the water and the very air we breathe...all products of a system that we are really just a small part of. Yet, to Christians, we are indeed the most important component, although that’s a bitter pill to swallow at times when we factor in how cruel we are capable of being to each other.

There has long been conflict between what are called the creationist and evolutionary theories. Scientists believe, based on vast amounts of accumulated evidence, that life evolved during millions of years of upheaval from simple organisms into what we have now. Somewhere along the way, we humans emerged from that primordial soup to become the dominant species. Christians, on the other hand, believe that a supreme being, God, brought it all into existence, but over a much shorter period of time, and then formed humans out of the dust to oversee all that had come before them.

I’m not knowledgeable enough to argue or expound upon either or both of those theories. All I know is that, when I step off the treadmill of life and onto the firmer more static surface of field or forest, I detect a distinct presence there that I find nowhere else. Something exists in that silence and serenity that is reinforced by the simplicity and plainness of the moment. Now, it’s not that everything around me...trees, plants, stones, running water, wildlife...is simply made. For all of those things are complex by their very nature, and there is nothing truly simple about any of them. But they exist on a vastly different plane, one where complications or conflicts do not exist, where there are no cracks to let any of them in.

Does that mean there’s no violence in nature? Not at all. Anyone who’s seen a hawk latch onto a chipmunk and make off with it sees it in action. But here’s the difference: such violence is generated purely by the passion for survival in the hawk, and the chipmunk is merely its hapless unfortunate victim. The negative impetuses that we humans are sadly all too familiar with...hatred, vengeance, retaliation, cruelty...do not exist in the world of Nature. Animals kill to survive. A tree sheds its leaves because to cling to them through the winter would mean certain death. Only humans kill and destroy for all the wrong reasons. We do, of course, have a choice in the matter. But the newspapers and news programs are full of stories of those who made the wrong one.

So what about this creation vs. evolution argument? What should I make of it? Nothing, really. For no matter what I think or however long I think it, both will remain nothing more than theories to those who seek to consider them as such. Reasons will continue to be found for the validity of both, yet the situation will continue to be unresolved and will remain entirely dependent on either belief in science, which is always subject to discussion or interpretation, or faith in God, which, for Christians, is not. Then, too, there are those who seek to reconcile the two, to find the common ground where they most closely meet, where it just might be possible to attribute to God all those millions of years during which a couple of humble cells took their sweet time developing into a bull frog, a blue jay or a German Shepherd. This calls to mind a passage from Psalm 90, verse 4 that reads “A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by...”

So what did I come up with from all this? Just this: that I won’t tamper with success. I’ll just keep going into the woods, keep taking photos of wildflowers in a field, or walking along the seashore, breathing in all that crisp clean air and talking wordlessly to God. Because if He is anywhere at all, it’s in any one of those places….where he sweeps his hand across the landscape and whispers to me...”See this? I made it all for you!”

Note: Scripture verse taken from the New International Version (NIV)

Monsters of a Different Sort

As a child growing up in the 1950's and 60's, I, like many others, loved monster movies. Back then, they consisted mostly of haunted houses, ghosts, and big reptilian creatures like Godzilla and, of course, King Kong and Frankenstein.

As time went by and movie production moved into the digital age, complete with high-tech graphics, the "monsters" got more and more terrifying and the back stories much gorier. Now, there isn't much of a story at all to most horror movies. They've gotten so bad that I refuse to watch them. Give me Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, or Bela Lugosi, and my own imagination, any day!

As I reached a certain age, however, I began to realize that those movies weren't so scary anymore. Life, as I was finding out, serves up enough real monsters of its own, and they're right in front of me. They are the hardships that we all encounter at some point in our lives, and most of the time, they don't even present themselves in visible form at all. It might be a Stage Four cancer diagnosis or the accidental death of someone we loved...losing a job or watching a home burn down...finding out that a spouse has been unfaithful or one of our children has gotten into some serious trouble...

I remember as a child trying to imagine what it would be like if something bad were to happen to my parents. I just could not fathom it, and the mere thought of it chilled me to the bone. When it finally happened many years later, I was older, but it was as just as frightening as I'd once imagined it, only on a much deeper level.

I also remember always asking my mother to leave the hall light on when she put us to bed. I had an active imagination and would always think that something in the dark would get me in the night. Now, 60 years later, I feel it strongly again, as there really is something out to get me. He is called the Evil One, the Master of Lies, and he will stop at nothing to try to get me to weaken and succumb. Now, though, the light isn’t in the hallway. The light is my faith, and I "turn it on" every day to help me battle, and defeat the Evil One and all those things that terrify me.

Right now, the world is simmering in a cauldron of evil, and monsters of a new sort have come out from the closet and from under the bed and are all around, waiting to pounce. Hatred is manifested daily in the news and even people closer by are showing sides of themselves I never knew existed. These are very very difficult times, and we need God’s hand in our lives more than ever. He is essentially the Light that banishes all the monsters, for none of them have any power over Him. When I’ve had my fill of all the sadness going on around me, all the anger and the rage and the disrespect and the sinfulness, I turn to the Lord and remember my mother’s words...

“You’ll be safe now, and nothing will harm you.”

And nothing ever will as long as God’s light is shining on my darkest nights.