Newsletter 3/14/2025

All things were made through Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made.  John 1:3

There is still beauty in this world. As I drive to work, and then back home from work, I am stunned by the curvature of the sloping, vibrant, green carpeted hills. The trees have not all begun to sprout their leaves, but their wooden statuesque forms stand still as a constant reminder of their timelessness and unchanging positions as observers of the seasons. Pillowy clouds hover over the sky. The recent rains have encouraged more growth and the water from above fills ponds and rivers. Today there was a bit of snow at the house. The white blanket briefly covered the landscape with a cold embrace. “It is tea weather”, I said to my coworker as I arrived at work. I’d opt for a hot coco too if I had any in my office. 

There is beauty in nature, because there is beauty in God. Art, music, and poetry are the expressions of the human soul, expressions of the heart. Nature is the expression of God’s soul, God’s own heart. It is where His compositions of music are found. From the birds of the air to the whale songs in the deep sea. His artwork is hung in space like antique paintings are hung in an art gallery. The poetic propensity of God can be heard in the wind as it swirls and seen in the skyline at the approach of dusk. His rhymes are the inspiration behind all others. 

Yet, it seems that human progress is too fast paced, too occupied with other things to truly appreciate all this beauty. The highways leading up into the foothills are dotted with the lifeless bodies of creatures that were too slow to dodge oncoming four-wheeled ingenuity. Deer, skunks, coyotes, and as the days warm up, snakes too, will become casualties. But I feel, and fear, that there is a greater casualty than the death of scurrying and bounding animals. It is that we are likely losing our collective connection to the wild, to the natural world. We are all too consumed with all things technological, digital. We have traded the real world for the unreal world. We look at pictures of nature, or videos of natural things, but we can’t reach out and feel what we see. We can’t smell, taste, or interact with it. A screened image is a lousy representation of that which itself is alive. And as our nature deficit disorders go undiagnosed, I fear we are also losing our sense of the beauty of God. Because in order to see beauty in Him, we must find it in that which was created by Him. And the more distant we are from beauty in the real world, the more distant we are from the beauty of the spiritual world. 

All reality was made through Christ. There is nothing that exists that He did not create. And while we are incessantly surrounded by what man has made, we have to try that much harder to engage in what is purely made by God. We say that nature is the second book of revelation about the divine character. I’m not so sure I think that anymore. While I believe that Scripture is the ultimate source of truth about Jesus Christ and the historical and prophetic disclosure of God’s will, nature has actually been around longer than the printed Bible. Yet, it was by the Word of God that nature itself was formed. So maybe it ought to be said that together, the Biblical and the natural are inseparable complimentary companions that give us an unrivaled picture of God. Therefore, if we want to find nearness and closeness to the Creator, we can go into nature. If we are feeling disconnected and distant from the Lord, we can hear Him speaking in the natural elements. If we are emotionally unwell, we can be refreshed by the park, the woods, the creek, or the backyard escape. If we are overwhelmed by the screens and dings and media and news cycles and sports and games and the unending options to entertain ourselves to death, we can turn it all off and withdraw from it all to rediscover the beauty of the real world. 

Pastor Dean