Let Nature Do It’s Job

There’s nothing I enjoy more than getting my kayak into a stream before the sun comes up. It’s all therapy for me, the steam lofting off the water retaining the heat from the prior summer day and the birds welcoming the rising sun with their songs. It all baptizes my thoughts in gratitude. It make makes me think about God.

This cry of the wild is not only primitive but profoundly biblical. King David says the heavens are sending a message—telling us of the glory of the One who made all things (Psalm 19). On one occasion, David, in standing beneath the starlit sky, contemplated the question, “what does it mean to be a human being living in God’s world?”. The Apostle Paul carries this theme in the New Testament telling us the world speaks of God’s invisible attributes (Romans 1) and calling the seasons of nature “God’s witnesses” (Acts 14). This is what nature was designed to do.

So, let nature do it’s job this summer. Get out there. Don’t stay locked up. Put on the sunscreen and bug spray on and brave this beautiful world. George Washington Carver put it this way, “I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.” Gerald Manley Hopkins gives a wonderful reflection on this natural reality in the following poem pointing out how we can miss the majestic message of the natural world:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God! There’s a message out there we really don’t want to miss. There’s a glory out there we need not only to be reminded of but to regularly revel in. Nature is God’s broadcasting station. Let’s tune in.