Our place...

I have been spending time with the creation stories in Scripture, as well as the role of creation in scripture. They are wonderful, as they celebrate with awe and wonder God's creative ability. It is that sense of "awe" that the sabbatical has truly pushed me to recover. Recently, Jan and I were looking at the Milky Way, with shooting stars and satellites passing by, and the immensity of the universe and our small place within it overwhelmed me. Much like the psalmist, who as noted in an earlier post, sees the vastness of the universe and marvels at our place in it, I was struck by God's creative imagination and God's interest in little ol' me. The more I've spent out in nature, the more I realize that I, and maybe most of us, have been taught to "read" nature not with eyes of wonder and glory, but reason and understanding and thus have lost at times a sense of amazement at the intricacy and variety of life that surrounds us. I recently came across a few lines from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass", that capture the idea:

When I hear the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide and measure them;

When I sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured,

with much applause in the lecture room.

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Til rising and gliding out, I wandered by myself.

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

If anything, looking with nature, that is God's creative masterpiece, with eyes of wonder and awe, keeps life and who we are in perspective.

Pondering

If you look closely, you can see a person sitting out on the rocks. It's me from our trip to the San Juan's. I've been doing a lot of similar kind of "pondering" during the sabbatical. I love being quiet out in the midst of nature - listening, paying attention to what's around and seeing what happens. Over the years what I have learned is that if you are quiet for awhile, nature will resume it's activity around you - otters, seals, gators, etc. will start moving around again. These ponderings have sent me to two verses. One is Psalm 8 in which the psalmist ponders creation and wonders that in the midst of the vastness of creation, God pays attention to human beings, yeah even to little ol' me. Sitting on the edge of Puget Sound and the power of the cold waters and their vastness brought the words of the psalmist back to me, especially at night where there was no background illumination to mute the stars. Then especially, I sensed the wonder of the universe, and the greater wonder of God's concern for me. The other verses come from Jeremiah 8 and Ecclesiastes 3, where the prophet looks at nature and notes that the animals know their seasons and their places while the teacher notes that there is a season for everything under the heavens. If anything the sabbatical has been about rediscovering the rhythm of life and paying attention to the rhythms inherit in nature. Once again, the first story of the Bible that introduces the sabbath idea, Genesis 1, speaks of sabbath as a rhythm inherit in nature, that even God can take time off to enjoy God's handiwork. If it is good enough for God, maybe it is a message that we all need in hectic and frantic times. I am grateful for all those who have made this season of sabbath a possibility!

Water Wars????

One of the books that I read this summer in entitled, When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century. It is a fascinating look at rivers around the world and issues that are arising from over use of these rivers. Ever since I read the book and talked with some folks around Jacksonville, I have noticed as never before water issues in local papers wherever we have been. In Seattle, an editorial in the local paper mentioned the removing of old dams on rivers so that the salmon could run and fisheries (and therefore fisherman who depend on them for their livelihoods) could prosper. On the way home, the headline in the Atlanta paper after a red-eye flight was about the brewing water war between Georgia, Florida and Alabama over Lake Lanier. Then, this morning there's a report in the Times-Union about springs being tapped before they reach the St. Johns. The premise of the book is that even in water surplus areas (like our situation where we seem surrounded by water), water is going to become more of an issue each year. The issues range from water usage to water conservation, to water rights. The Bible talks about water as a gift from God as part of God's good created order and water even "co-operates" with God in creation (more on that interesting idea later). Thus, the question I think for us as Christians comes back to one of stewardship, that is, how to we care for and share this gift of God not as water "owners", but as "stewards" - that is, those entrusted by God to care for the world and its water. More later....