I love being outside. I love Nature. I dress my children in weather-appropriate clothes and we go for long walks, we stop at streams and hunt for tadpoles at the edges of lakes. We pick flowers and leaves and we collect rocks and sticks, and we find bugs let them crawl on our hands. We lay in the grass and watch the clouds moving overhead, we return after the sun sets to watch the stars reveal themselves. Being around Nature fills me with wonder. We planted seeds last weekend, and although we prepared the soil and we watered them on the days it didn't rain, we didn't make anything. We are like middle men, fetching the seeds and putting them in the ground, but we didn't make the seeds and we didn't make the ground, and now something completely new is poking through the soil and it's amazing.
Here's the thing: the first sentence in the Bible says "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Genesis 1:1 I'm guessing you knew that, even if you've never read the Bible, even if you've never read Genesis. It's one of those pervasive ideas, like "Til death do us part" and "Peace be with you...and also with you" and "And now you know...the rest of the story" that any American person has ingrained; they probably don't know its origin or even the first time they heard it. What I've been thinking lately is what if there's a reason for that? What if that's the first thing in the Bible just in case some people never read further? What if that is God's little hint to us that whatever isn't addressed in the rest of the book, whatever questions we have, the answers are found all around us, in Nature. What if Nature is God's cheat sheet?
I have read the Bible, the whole thing, cover to cover. It is full of good stuff, confusing stuff, boring stuff. But it never mentions abortion. That word is nowhere to be found in the Good Book. Neither is factory or car. The word autism is absent, although there are plenty of stories about people who are crippled, disfigured, impaired physically. The people with these ailments who met Jesus and believed in Him were healed, but many sick and handicapped people never had that honor. The events and people contained in the Bible are all from a pretty small geographic area, if you consider the whole Earth. We don't read about Australia or South Africa or even the United States My point is that our modern world can seem vastly different from the time when Jesus lived, or the age of prophets and pharoahs and gardens and talking serpents. Except that the world hasn't changed, not if you look around at all that God gave us when he created it.
So then...what can we learn about God by observing Nature? Let's start with fire. We have been making fires in our backyard this past month. Our whole family gathers around to watch the flames and be near the heat. My husband and I take turns building and maintaining the fire. We try to keep the kids from throwing things in, like their plush toys or a bucket of water. Neither is good for the fire. The fire needs dry, flammable items to consume. It has to start small. There is no way around this. If my sticks are wet, or too big, the fire isn't going to happen. So I gather some dried leaves, I place small twigs on them, then I strike the match. It's best to try to stick the match in a few different spots, just in case one doesn't burn. The little points of fire quickly spread, meeting in the middle and then things begin to happen. The thin leaves burn up fast, so I have to have the twigs ready, and maybe a few slightly bigger sticks. The leaves get the fire going, but the wood burns longer. The next phase is where it sometimes gets tricky. See, I can't keep adding leaves to keep the fire going. I'm not sure why, but what ends up happening is I just get a big pile of ashes. I have to add wood at the early point, and then I have to start progressively throwing bigger pieces of wood in. I can't sustain a fire on small incendiary items. If I want the fire to last (and believe me, I do), then what goes in the fire has to change. Also, there's a bit of an art to placement. What is already burning has to touch what I want to burn next. They need to have a point of connection, but they can't be too close. A log laying directly on top of another log of equal size will choke the fire, give it nowhere to go. It's the same for logs lying next to each other but not touching...how is the fire going to spread? Another important element to fire-building is boundaries. Probably our fire wouldn't go too far beyond our circle, because it has been a rainy spring, and most of the grass around it is green and moist. But what about the blanket our family sits on, or our clothes? If the fire spread out of control, it would burn us. It might even damage our house, our neighbor's house. We have to be intentional about where the fire is going in order to enjoy its benefits and not be destroyed by it.
Personally, I think you can apply this metaphor lots of ways. It could apply to leadership and empowering other people: we light their fires and they in turn light others, and the fire grows. We could compare evangelism to fire, because the gospel started small in Jerusalem and now it's preached in every corner of the earth. But I want to talk about the most personal aspect of Christianity: our relationship with God. For me, I feel like we started out like those dry leaves. Learning about God in Sunday school as a child, reading the Bible with my dad...it was like a match was struck and placed against my heart. But adolescence was such a distracting time; I ignored the fire and focused on getting good grades instead. All of my attention was on getting into the right college, being liked by my friends, trying not to embarrass myself. The fire never got very big, and my schoolwork and attempts to fit in were like big, wet branches that inhibited its growth. I was 18 when I looked for the fire again, and realized it had gone out. I was in the dark. Well, did I really need the fire? Could I just get through life without it? It was worth a try. In the dark, I couldn't see, but dry leaves were piling up again, and soon another match ignited them. This time, I didn't take the fire for granted. I looked at it closely, I studied it. I put more leaves on. I started going back to church, I reached for my Bible again. I joined a young adult group with my (soon to be) husband and started asking questions. Those questions, and the patient people who answered them were like wood in my fire. Beyond knowing what the Bible says, I learned how to apply it to my life. It started to become more real, more important. Shortly after I got married, I was baptized. Now, of course, the water doesn't really work with the fire, but baptism in my relationship with God was like lighter fluid. The fire spread all over, started approaching some bigger logs. At this point, I started to feel the heat. A little fire doesn't really spread much warmth. It takes a bigger, more concentrated burn to really catch on, and once it does, it no longer needs constant control and tending. The fire knows what to do, and it burns away what isn't necessary. It was at this point that my life and my heart really began to change, to take on the shape that the fire was making and not the one I wanted it to be. I learned about love, about what it really means to love my neighbors and the poor and the lepers. I was ready for bigger logs. So in came fear and insecurity and shame, and the fire took over and burned them. As it grew, I think my fire began to be noticeable to people around me. But I can't just tear down the boundaries of my fire pit and let the fire go every where. I have to let people approach me with their little sticks, let them prod my glowing center and take the flame to their own pile of leaves.
This is how I see God in Nature. This is how my heart has grown and changed, and how I'm learning to let God in. Sometimes this blog is an overflow for that fire, a place to burn a little longer.
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