Creation is Wonderful

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. ~Psalm 19:1-4

I’ve said before that there’s nowhere on Earth I don’t want to visit. There’s some places I’d like to keep my visit short, or only go with a qualified guide for various reasons (Australia, I don’t mind snakes, but how did you wind up with the booby prize of all the most venomous snakes, spiders, jellyfish, and whatever else can kill you? I’d love to visit, but this arachnophobe is seriously uncertain of how to work out the whole spiders and scorpions in the down under thing. How do I go visit koalas and wombats and kangaroos and avoid the deadly beasties?) Still, I can not think of a single place that I don’t want to see. That it wouldn’t be exciting to say “I’ve been there, I’ve seen that with my own two eyes, I’ve seen the beauty that this world has to offer in that place!”

We bought the Planet Earth series on Blu-Ray (the one narrated by David Attenborough, of course) and we watch it every so often, and instead of sating my appetite for certain places, or leaving me convinced to never go there, dear GOD, what was I thinking?!? it only whets it, sharpening my desire to see these beautiful places where the mountain peaks reach above the cloud layer, or the flood plains where the elephants come in to drink and wash and refresh themselves after a year of drought.

When I was growing up, we used to “go crazy”. Daddy would pile us into the car and we’d go driving. He might have picked a destination in advance, but we didn’t know. It wasn’t about where we were going… it was about the journey there. We drove through Hart’s Content, a national wildlife preserve in the Allegheny National Forest before we went berrying on the Tidioute Overlook, and stopped at a roadside stand for ice cream on the way home… because that stand had peacocks. We went to Chapman Dam and the Reservoir there, enjoying the sights out the window on the way. We pulled over to pick wildflowers and hang them up to dry when we got home. It wasn’t about where we were going… it was about seeing the beauty in the world around us, and enjoying the time we had together.

“Going Crazy” is a tradition John and I have picked up. He may pick a destination, or he might just pick a direction. Sometimes, we take the dogs, letting them hang their heads out the windows and just smell the smells as we go. Sometimes, we just go crazy as we come home from somewhere, instead of taking the same way home that we always do. It’s not about where we end up… it’s about enjoying the sights of the world around us and the time we have together on the journey.

We’ve also made it a priority to travel together. We took a cruise in the Caribbean in 2006, and one in the Mediterranean in 2008. We’ve been to St. Louis, to Chicago, to Dallas. We detour through cities on the way back from other places; we detoured through New Orleans one year so I could go to the French Quarter and stop at Café Du Monde for beignets and chicory café au lait. We travel with our families, and we’ve traveled together for work. Even on our honeymoon, we traveled to Orlando, Florida, marking John’s first time on a plane!

A Sunset in July in Owasso, OK

So why do we travel? What is with this desire I have to see this world we live in? Look at the pictures sprinkled in this piece. I took them tonight. Living in Oklahoma, you learn to watch the sky, and particularly, the color of the sky… sometimes, if the color is off, it means bad weather is coming. Tonight, the color of the sky made me nervous, so I went out front to see what it looked like outside. That’s when I saw the cloud bank in the pictures. I was facing east, with the sunset behind me. The way the setting sun lit up those cumulonimbus clouds was breathtaking! I pulled out my phone (it’s got a great camera in it) and snapped the pictures you see.

This is a beautiful world. Oh, I know, we hear lots of doom and gloom these days, especially with the oil spill in the gulf. But stop for a minute and really look at the world around you. Look at the way the clouds form and shift and play in the sky. Look at the grass and wildflowers and trees. Look at the majesty of mountains reaching high into the sky. Look at the amazing depths that the seafloor reaches. Look at the wonder of life at the edges… the bacteria and mussels and kelp and shrimp and fish that live in places where photosynthesis is impossible, and they rely on chemosynthesis, on the conversion of the chemicals boiling out of the ocean floor!

When I consider this world, I have a few thoughts:

What is man in the scope of all of this wonder? Who are we next to all of this? In the grand scheme of things, what do we amount to? If we were to crowd every human being alive today into the space it takes for us to stand up, so we all crowded in together… we’d fit on one continent. Not just one continent, but within one of the smaller countries. We’d be smooshed, but we’d fit. We’ve barely explored the oceans, and they cover the vast majority of this planet. And that’s just ONE body in the entire expanse of space! If you go outside and look up, even in the cities you can see the stars, and around them circle other planets. We have 8 more planets in our solar system (I refuse to accept Pluto’s demotion!) and that’s not counting the planet-sized moons and asteroids! We hardly count for anything against the vast scope of all of the cosmos!

And then, as I consider how small we are, I wonder how much gall it takes to assume that we have the power to break our planet! I know, this is a radical idea, and there will be those of you who disagree with me, and point me to the gulf. We’ve had asteroids hit the earth, and the earth survived. We’ve had volcanos erupt and wipe out cities, and humanity survived. We’ve had plagues that wiped out one third of a continental population, and humanity and the earth survived. Mankind cannot be both small and minute and amount to nothing in the cosmos and still be so big we can destroy the planet. We can’t be so infinitesimal we don’t amount to anything and yet still have the power to destroy everything. The two ideas are mutually exclusive. At most, we can wipe humanity off the earth, and while that would be a very bad thing indeed, we still didn’t destroy the earth. We still haven’t wrecked the planet beyond the planet’s ability to recover! Nor am I completely convinced we can completely wipe ourselves out… I’m sure there are enough genetic wildcards to survive whatever we unleash, or enough survivalists that have buried in enough to breed themselves through the holocaust we create. It’s what humans do. We survive.

But… and this is the big one… I believe that God spun this all into motion. I don’t know if it was through a big bang, or through literal spoken words that formed existence from a void. I don’t know if it took 6 days or 6 millennia or 6000 millennia. None of those details matter to me. I believe there was an Uncaused Cause that caused this all to be. And I marvel at the creativity that spun this into motion, whether that creativity did so by actively painting the sunset, or by setting in motion the natural laws that create it. Mankind cannot do what nature does the way nature does it on the scale that nature does it at the energy cost natures does it. We sit and plot and plan, and our best efforts might come close, but we’re still not quite there. We’ve not yet engineered anything that will do what a blade of grass does the way a blade of grass does it… and yet, grass does it all without any premeditation or intention (so far as we can tell).

Beloved… if this is what happens when God speaks existence, what do you think Heaven is going to be like, when everything is perfect, unspoiled by death or decay? What do you think we get in Heaven, when God sings for joy over the works He has made?

I want to see this world, Beloved… because this is the Shadow, and Heaven is the Form. This is just the rough draft. As breathtaking as this world is, Beloved… it gets better. I want to see the best this world has to offer, so that when my day is bad, and my heart is heavy, I can look at the wonders around me and know it only gets better from here.