Seek ShalomSample

SHALOM WITH CREATION

I have this game I play sometimes with the students at my school that I call “Preschool or Professional?” It’s a contest where students must decide if what they see or hear was created by a preschool student or a professional.

One time I played “Preschool or Professional: Art Edition.” I showed students a work of art, and they had to determine if it was created by a preschool student or a professional artist. I showed them ten different works of art, and they got every single answer right. (I didn’t say it was a hard game, did I?). Our students had no trouble differentiating between preschool and Picasso. As we looked at some of the most famous paintings in history, it was not difficult to recognize the creative talent that captured the scene on canvas.

King David declared in Psalm 19:1-4,

“The heavens proclaim the glory of God.
The skies display his craftsmanship.
Day after day they continue to speak;
night after night they make him known.
They speak without a sound or word;
their voice is never heard.
Yet their message has gone throughout the earth,
and their words to all the world.”

When we spend time in God’s good creation we see His handiwork. In the created world, we read His story, written “without a sound or word,” that extends into all the world.

I ascended to the top of Camelback Mountain and hiked across Devil’s Bridge in Arizona. I’ve swum among the coral reefs of the Florida Keys and Cozumel, Mexico. I’ve stood along the shore of Niagara Falls and paddled the whitewater of a half-dozen rivers in the southeast. I’ve basked in the majesty of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, Calgary, and kayaked among the mangroves of the Caribbean islands. I’ve walked the sandy beaches of the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Lakes.

In each of those moments, I felt a deep communion with God. It was like stepping into a sanctuary and encountering the sacred.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning described it well when she wrote,

“Earth is crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pick blackberries.”

There is evidence of heaven all around us in creation, and as Browning reminds us, even the “common bush is afire with God.” It isn’t just in the grandeur of redwood trees or a snow-covered mountain. It’s in the natural world all around us.

We live in the country, and my kids love to play outside. It is impossible to get them to keep their shoes on. They love to be barefoot outdoors, and I think it’s because, in some unknown way, children understand what most adults have forgotten - that God is present in His creation, and we are standing on holy ground. Yes, we should take off our shoes.

The rest, Browning notes, choose to enjoy the fruit of creation with no regard for the Creator.

But Paul wrote in Romans 1,

“They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. Forever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.”

Creation reveals the Creator.

In July 2021, I spent two days on a safari truck in the heart of Kenya’s Serengeti National Park. When we first entered the preserve, I was giddy with excitement at seeing so many animals in their natural habitat. There was no sign of human encroachment as far as the eye could see. There were no buildings, no power lines, no highways, no factories, and no piles of garbage. In that moment, I was overcome with a desire to worship God. As I surveyed this landscape, untouched and uncorrupted by human hands, I began to imagine it as what the Garden must have been like in Genesis before the fall of man and what the Garden City will be like as we read in Revelation 21 and 22. I witnessed a glimpse of the vision for the in-between - at peace in God’s good creation.

Shalom.

No matter how good the technology gets, AI and virtual reality will never compare to God’s created world. The world is better viewed through binoculars than our VR Goggles. We need more time with birds and less with the bird app (a.k.a. Twitter.) More streams, less streaming.

We were created to live in a spiritual reality, not a virtual reality.

We need to touch the earth, the grass, the butterflies, and the ladybugs more and our devices less. We need to unlock our imaginations more than our iPhones.

We weren’t made to live on concrete and pavement. We need time outdoors. To breathe fresh uncirculated air. We need to bask in the warm glow of the sun and not just in the blue light of our screens.

Spend time in creation. Take a walk. Sit outside in the cool of the day. Explore your local parks.

Creation reveals the Creator. Seek shalom with God and creation.

REFLECTION

Creation reveals the Creator. Have your experienced that in your life? If so, what was it like? What keeps you from spending time in creation?