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.