Quick . . . what National Park lies between the Great Smoky Mountains NP and the Everglades NP?

I have to confess that I didn’t know the answer to that question until a couple weeks ago. 

After completing plans to join our youngest son and daughter-in-law, Dave and Ruth, for Thanksgiving in Columbia SC, Ruth expressed her eagerness for Marge and me to join them for a hike in the swamp—the BIG swamp formed by the Congaree River some twenty miles south of Columbia.  It was then that I learned about one of our newest national parks: the Congaree NP, which is mostly a designated wilderness area of some 15,000 acres and filled with all the creatures that one might imagine occupying a Southern swamp.  Marge was not too eager to venture into the realm of swamp denizens until she heard that we would be walking a two-mile, elevated boardwalk—”elevated” being the key word!

So walk it we did—on a splendid, cool but sunny day on Tuesday.  We had no major wildlife encounters but did enjoy the birdlife in the now leaf-bare deciduous trees that make up one of the tallest of such canopies in the world.  Although midday in the late fall in a deciduous forest is not dramatic, the silences and solitude of such a place were themselves a joy. 

When I’m back at my home computer, I’ll share some photos which should give you an idea about the nature of the park—which will be more impressive once the drought in the Southeast has run its course and the cypress roots will again protrude from the water like the knees of bony teenagers bathing in short tubs.

Just outside the park, we stopped at a small church—Baptist, or course—to take photos of its old cemetery overtopped with live and red oaks drapped, in picture-book fashion, with Spanish moss.  One tombstone stood out with its curious epitaph:

MEMORY
OF
MARGARET GLENN
BORN–1878
DIED  MAY 24  1940
SHE HATH DONE
WHAT SHE COULD

It didn’t seem at first to be very respectful of Margaret, but when you think about how different our civilization would be if all of us did what we could—in the Baptist understanding of our duties before God—the world would indeed demonstrate more of its original goodness. 

God bless your soul, Margaret Glenn, for doing what you could.

See you outdoors!

Dean

One of the sad misconceptions of many within the conservative evangelical church has been the understanding that we are “aliens and strangers” on the earth.  The truth is, however, that we are to be aliens and strangers to the world—to the ungodly and rebellious world system ruled over by Satan.  The Scripture informs us that this world system is going to be destroyed and its diabolical ruler vanquished for eternity.  And as a long and glorious celebration of our Savior’s victory, we are going to reign with Him on this very earth which so many of us now abuse and malign.  When we attain our final and complete adoption as children of God, we will embrace a good earth healed from the curse where thorns no longer “infest the ground.” 

So the second coming of the Messiah is bad news for this world system, yet glorious good news for the earth and for those of us who will reign with Him upon it.  I’m convinced that it is time that we imagine with C.S. Lewis the moment when “that hideous strength” of the enemy of God and man is finally wrestled into defeat and submission, and when all the elements, plants, and living creatures of a restored earth join in one grand united doxology with redeemed mankind in praise to our Savior and Creator, Jesus Christ: It will be the return of shalom—of the peaceable kingdom.  The apostle John shared with us his vision of that moment:

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever! (Rev. 5:13, NIV).

Note in that passage how John explicitly includes the entire biosphere: creatures in the sky, on the earth, under the earth, on the sea, and in the sea.  Imagine the scene: larks, dragonflies, rabbits, badgers, moles, trap-door spiders, Portugese men-of-war, sharks, and sea stars all attending to the Savior-Creator and singing!  Who says Narnia is fiction?  Remember that Aslan is the Lion of Judah! Think of the joy that will fill the Hundred-Acre Wood.  Tigger will jump higher than ever and Eeyore, then the eternal optimist, will “bouncy-bounce” with him.  Earth will be Peralandra, and Neverland will become Everland!

Many of us may need to repent of our careless lack of camaraderie with the other creatures of the earth and of our lack of care for the marvelous handiwork of God that has faithfully given witness from the beginning of His divine nature and eternal power (Rom. 1:20).  With our hearts and with our hands, let us work toward the anticipated restoration of the good Earth.

As we approach the busy holiday season, I’ve been thinking: wouldn’t it be a grand thing if believers came to truly understand that Thanksgiving is the Christian “earth day” when we celebrate the bounty of God’s good creation.  Imagine how the holiday seasons from Thanksgiving through New Years would take on a whole new meaning if we got off the materialistic juggernaut and celebrated the first advent of the Messiah with an active expectation of His second advent when we will join hands with all the redeemed entities of the restored cosmos.  I’m not sure how it would look, but here are some things we could do.

1.  We could make the day after Thanksgiving a fast day when we repent of our careless attitude toward God’s good earth.  Instead of helping to make that day the busiest shopping day of the year, we’d turn the eyes of the world away from Mammon and toward God.  For those of us who live in the north of the United States, a walk in the woods marked by the death of summer and the chill of coming winter would increase the significance of our fast.

2.  We could celebrate Christmas by using God’s great gift of creativity to us by making gifts for one another.  Revive the old custom of creatively taking of the bounty of the earth and turning it into something that will remind us with each use of the good earth and its coming day of victory: nature craft items, jams and other preserves, bird houses and bird feeders, and a single orange to remind us of the past when celebrations were homespun and simple.  We could consider not burdening ourselves with expensive toys that will only take more of our time and money—and unnecessarily make a negative impact upon the natural world.  We could shun big-ticket items that in the long run reduce our ability to truly be stewards of the earth.

3.  We could celebrate the new year with resolutions that compel us to look forward to the restoration of the good earth when Jesus comes to reign.

Being thankful for God’s good earth,

Dean

My recollections of the sixties are often poignant and painful—memories of protest songs and marches; of “liberation” from the establishment and its values; of a bloody, frustrating, no-win war; of naked Woodstock revelers; of unkempt, barefoot hippies storming the fences of nuclear power plants, and of radical college professors berating Christianity for bringing civilization to the eve of doomsday.

It was an agonizing time of soul-searching for the Church, and one of the important commentators of the time was Francis Schaeffer. Thousands of Christians pored over his books to discover the reason for unreason and to understand why Western civilization had come to such a state. At the end of the process, we all asked with Schaeffer, “How should we then live?” Much of what this philosopher/theologian said about the demise of Christianity in the West was quickly understood and accepted as the basis upon which a revitalized Church could once again make its message heard in a “post-Christian” world.

Curiously, however, one of Schaeffer’s books was overlooked or, perhaps more correctly, ignored as an aberration of an otherwise astute thinker: it was titled Pollution and the Death of Man (published in 1970 by Tyndale House). The book title and the cover itself likely added to its lack of popularity: a photograph of a skull on a pile of dirt. Were not the rants of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden enough? Did we really need another negative message to add to our burden of bad news? We had ministries to run and families to raise; how could we be expected to be enthusiastic about another message of impending disaster—this time from the environment?

Those who took the time to read Pollution and the Death of Man discovered, however, that its message was not just another commentary on the decline of Christianity, but it was a challenge to the Church to apply biblical principles to the world’s environmental crises. It’s subtitle reflected that: A Christian View of Ecology. Sadly, the book was published some thirty years too soon, for only since about the turn of the century have a significant number of believers come to the point where we are willing to examine the premises of the book—some of which now appear to be prophetic.

Because conservative Christianity readily attached itself to the economics of progress and prosperity and a virtually unregulated free market, and because many of those of a Dispensationalist stance [my own background] believed God is going destroy this earth utterly, it was felt by many that Christians might just as well ignore the earth’s physical condition and concentrate instead on saving souls and ushering them to Glory, as the hymn says, “on flowery beds of ease.” Others appeared to feel that since Jesus was going to return in a few years and fix things, there was little need for us to do anything.

Jesus never intended the promise of His future return to be an excuse for ignoring our present responsibilities.

Well, Jesus did not return in the seventies, nor in the eighties or nineties. And, in part because of the Church’s failure to apply the scriptural principle of stewardship to our use of the earth’s resources, the world’s environmental problems have compounded. We have had to relearn this important lesson: Jesus never intended the promise of His future return to be an excuse for ignoring our present responsibilities.

Should the Church remain indifferent to the social and environmental consequences of a worldwide free-market economy unchecked by the Christian principles of justice, compassion, equity, charity, and stewardship? Freedom, capitalism, and democracy did not make America great; it was those factors tied to biblical principles—the decline of which is now devastating our economy and our environment.

I believe we must all come to recognize what the Christian farmer/philosopher Wendell Berry articulates so well:

Charity cannot be just human. . . . Once begun, wherever it begins, it cannot stop until it includes all Creation, for all creatures are parts of a whole upon which each is dependent, and it is a contradiction to love your neighbor and despise the great inheritance on which this life depends. . . . The divine mandate to use the world justly and charitably, then, defines every person’s moral predicament as that of a steward. But this predicament is hopeless and meaningless unless it produces an appropriate discipline: stewardship. . . . Is there not, in Christian ethics, an implied requirement of practical separation from a destructive and wasteful economy?

See you outdoors!

Dean

Check out this YouTube video. A great pre-Christmas message!

Click on the title below:

The Advent Conspiracy

Many thanks to Bob Rowe, Karen Crepin, and Gary Fawver for their great additions to the “Wonder Kids” page.  This kind of contribution makes it just what we want it to be: a community!