Sunset in Wisconsin 080208

Shimmering Beauty

You have to stand behind tree trunks, your lens protected from the incoming sun, to see it--the shimmering beauty of created things in motion, swept by the wind, reflecting God's light. It is an awesome sight, breath-taking really, and soul warming. Flowers, little leaves of all kinds and colors, plus pine and evergreen needles, all shimmering with life, even if different in kind and character.

Thanks be to God for [such] bounty and beauty, life that sustains us in body and mind:/plenty for all, if we learn how to share it, riches undreamed of to fathom and find.

(The Covenant Hymnal: A Worshipbook, No 712, verse 2)

A week now into Time Away, rest provides such windows constantly, whenever the chronos sweep of minutes and hours fades into kairos moments that never fail to trip one's gratitude and feed one's faith. All I did was to go out on the deck after supper to be quiet and alone. God and his creation did the rest, as the sound of the wind and the glorious movement of shimmering leaves and green needles caught hold of my soul.

Thus am I drawn to believe and trust this night, not out of duty but out of necessity.

This is my Father's world; God shines in all that's fair;

in rustling grass I hear him pass--he speak to me ev'rywhere.

This is my Father's world: why should my heart be sad?

The Lord is King, let heaven ring! God reigns; let earth be glad!

(The Covenant Hymnal: A Worshipbook, No 57, verse 3)

Time Away

The wood piece on our cabin wall spoke to me tonight, begging both to be seen through the eye of my camera and inscribed on my mind and heart. There is indeed a season for everything, and now for my wife and me it is time away. Not away from life, for where can one go away from that anymore than one can go away from God (Psalm 139)? Time away ought rather to be seen as time to renew one’s life, i.e. to step forward into reflection and rest even while stepping back awhile from routines and schedules. The latter, if never left, can bind—even harden—one’s spirit and choke not only one’s creative energy but his or her vitality as well.

The art piece is instructive. Get outside yourself, your study and home and let the rays of the sun permeate your being. Look at the birds of the air that neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. And consider the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. And do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today (Matthew 6:25-34). Take time away!

I live too much in chronos, clock time, chronologically So do you. Take time away to seek kairos, purposeful time--the perspective we all need to live closer to God and his will. One needn’t leave home to take time away, but it helps. Thoreau found time in the solitude of his home by Walden Pond. What matters is allowing some space and time to see yourself in larger perspective—to get beyond what you have achieved and experienced and thus begin to grasp life’s fuller dimensions. An anthem we once sang in the North Park (Chicago) Church choir when I was a teenager addresses the challenge, which always begins with inner yearning:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
while the swift seasons roll.
Leave thy low-vaulted past.
Let each new temple nobler than the last
get thee to heav’n with a dome more vast
till thou at length art free,
leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea.

Day two away for us has been a good day. May its blessings increase until it is time again to return, as we must--yet different, deeper and richer, as we long to be.

Ever Thought of Writing a Letter to God?

It might seem a strange idea, given the fact that even before a word is on your tongue God knows it completely (Psalm 139:4). Yet don’t you suppose that it might delight him to get a letter from you even so? On this Sunday evening I am delighted to share with you one such letter, written by my father years ago while looking out over the lake below with the sun setting on another day of rest for him at our summer cabin in Wisconsin. I have a whole file of such letters, written in his own hand, and I hope in the future to publish more of them, perhaps under a separate link on this website, as an encouragement to consider writing God yourself. It’s what the psalmist did, out of all the moods of his life. Why not you?

Dear God,

Why did you rest on the seventh day? Were you tired? That question makes me laugh. I have seen you at work too long to believe that. I have seen too many dawns break and too many sunsets, and too many winters and springs come and go, too many tides rise and fall, without any signs of weariness to believe that you needed to rest.

Had you finished your work? Is that why you rested? Your Son, when he was here, said you were still working as he was. That has always comforted me because we are in desperate need of your perfect strength. I suspect that you rested because you wanted us to rest. You sat down in your strength so that we might sit down in our weakness, so that you might restore our strength again.

Help us, dear God, to sit down beside you, or by the side of your son where he sits, weary by Jacob's well, a further expression of your accommodation to our weariness that you tasted … yourself in order still better to understand us. Help us, however, not merely to sit, but to enjoy you and thus replenish our lives. Forgive us that we miss our rest as if we did not trust you to keep on working and finally bring us into your kingdom.

Eric G. Hawkinson (1896-1984) Letter to God (unpublished)
Former Dean, North Park Theological Seminary