I walked home for lunch today (.72 miles one way according to Google Earth) and I still sense the pleasure of being showered with spent needles from a grove of white pines along my way.  The path was littered with pine straw and the unique pitch-tipped cones that make the tree so easily identifiable.  But best of all was the scent–that wonderful pine fragrance that emanates from the sun-warmed boughs carried by the clear fall air of West Michigan. 

It reminded me of an excerpt from a book by George MacDonald.  I had already been touched in my soul for years by the sensory delights of the piney woods when I came across MacDonald’s novel The Musician’s Quest about a man drawn by nature to nature’s God.  Robert Falconer, the main character, who had been constantly repulsed by spiritually stagnant and/or phony church people, was out on a walk pondering whether God was truly there when “a gentle wind, laden with pine odors from the sun-heated trees behind him, flapped its tight wing in his face.”  This scent and all nature around him soon became a divine messenger:

Strange as it may sound to those who have never thought of such things except in connection with Sundays and Bibles and churches and sermons, that which was now working in Falconer’s mind was the first dull movement of the greatest need that the human heart possesses–the need of God.  There must be truth in the scent of that pinewood; someone must mean it. There must be a glory in those heavens that depends not upon our imagination; some power greater than they must dwell in them.  Some spirit must move in that wind that haunts us with a kind of human sorrow; some soul must look up to us from the eye of that starry flower.  Little did Robert think that such was his need–that his soul was searching after the One whose form was constantly presented to him, but as constantly obscured by the words without knowledge spoken in the religious assemblies of the land.  Little did he realize that he was longing without knowing it on Saturday for that from which on Sunday he would be repelled, again without knowing it.*

How many are touched by nature’s God in this way?  And how many of us are insensitive to it as we carry on from week to week in churches that may be repelling such susceptible souls by our collective insensitivities.  I often feel that the part of the creation that was not made in the Creator’s image is sometimes a better witness than we are. 

* Bethany House Publishers, pp 95-96