His anger is but for a moment, and His favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. Psalm 30:5

At the age of 37 I entered a three-year “dark night of the soul” called mid-life crisis.  No, I didn’t buy a red sports car, abandon my family, and become a beach bum.  Mostly I cried a lot.  Sometimes at night I would go outside, look up at the stars, and ask, “God, where are you?” and weep again because the heavens were brass.  One day I fell crying into my wife’s lap—telling her that I needed God to step out of heaven and tell me that everything will be all right.  Her answer was Spirit-inspired: “God is not going to step out of heaven and tell you that, but I’m here and I’m telling you that everything is going to be all right!”  Marge and my friends became the voice and heart of Jesus during that bleak time.  They took my hand and carried the Light for me throughout the night until morning came again. 

Among the many lessons I learned at that time is when your soul is in anguish, the wonder of creation loses it’s capacity to create joy.  I even wrote a psalm about it—my mid-life crisis psalm. I’d like to repeat it here, but I’ve misplaced it.  The sum of it, though, is that I bewailed the loss of joy in my vocation as a Christian school administrator, in my wife and children, and in the natural world.  Living in Northern California at the time, I had access to some of the world’s most amazing natural wonders: Big Sur, the redwood forest, the Sierra Nevada, Point Reyes, and typically awe-inspiring Yosemite.  Yet they became incapable of giving me joy.  I was heartsick and only God could heal me—which He eventually did.  And I learned the lesson that C. S. Lewis taught in Screwtape Letters:

Sooner or later [God] withdraws, if not in fact, at least from [the believer’s] conscious experience, all. . . supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. [Chapter 8]

The creation by itself never satisfies the soul—a fact learned when one is heartsick.  It’s the existence, love, and care of our Creator/Savior and His people that makes joy in anything possible.  If the soul of someone in your sphere of influence is struggling in the night, stay with them and carry the Light; and keep reminding them that joy—and growth—will come again with the morning.

[Yosemite photos Uploaded on November 17, 2009 by ohad*]
[Candle image: www.massbible.org/blog/labels/light.html]

Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom. One generation will commend your works to another; they will tell of your mighty acts. They will speak of the glorious splendor of your majesty, and I will meditate on your wonderful works (Psalm 145:3-5).

Luther

I feel that every generation has what I call a “pride of the present”: we tend to believe that our thinking is sounder and our worldview more informed than the previous one—perhaps even all previous generations.  This is especially apparent in regard to the natural world—which science believes modern man has virtually mastered.  Because nature has been our easy provider, willing patient, and sometimes cadaver for so long, we have tended to lose respect for it.  The danger there is that what we no longer respect, we can easily come to abuse.

But that’s really not the point of this post.

I believe we modern followers of Christ have also become somewhat blind followers of science and have adopted the same utilitarian view toward God’s good creation that we see in much of science and industry.  The utilitarian approach, however, is really the worldview of the Enlightenment and the subsequent Industrial Revolution, and not of a true understanding of the theology of nature.

Interestingly, two of the most significant Reformers, John Calvin and Martin Luther, had been quite successful in framing a sound biblical theology of nature in the 16th century that corrected the faulty dualistic theology of the Middle Ages that saw the material world as something low and degraded that needed to be escaped from (a view that goes all the way back to Plato and is also foundational to Eastern religions).  Sadly, however, their followers became the champions of the “Protestant work ethic” that in part led to the Industrial Revolution and the ultimate devaluation of the creation that Calvin and Luther had helped to free from mysticism and dualism.  See the Wikipedia article about it here:

Calvin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

Calvin and Luther both had a high view of the natural world that I think we need to recapture.  I firmly believe we need to trade our pride of the present for humility and an understanding that other generations before us may have had a more biblically sound view of the creation than we do.  I go into depth on that issue in the article “Listening To the Right Voices,” which is in the “Articles” section of this Website.

To whet your appetite on rethinking how Christians ought to consider the creation, let me drop in a couple quotes on this post that you can also find on this blogsite under “Creation Quotations”:

From Luther:
“Now if I believe in God’s Son and bear in mind that He became man, all creatures will appear a hundred times more beautiful to me than before.  Then I will properly appreciate the sun, the moon, the stars, trees, apples, pears, as I reflect that he is Lord over and the center of all things.”

From Calvin:
“In every part of the world, in heaven and on earth, he has written and as it were engraven the glory of his power, goodness and eternity…. For all creatures, from the firmament even to the center of the earth, could be witnesses and messengers of his glory to all men, drawing them on to seek him and, having found him, to do him service and honor according to the dignity of a Lord so good, so potent, so wise and everlasting….For the little singing birds sang of God, the animals acclaimed Him, the elements feared and the mountains resounded with Him, the river and springs threw glances toward Him, the grasses and the flowers smiled.”

Little by little, the natural world is being remade in humanity’s image and forced to yield to our purposes alone.  Let’s not forget, however, that the One whose eye is on the sparrow is also watching us.

Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom. One generation will commend your works to another; they will tell of your mighty acts. They will speak of the glorious splendor of your majesty, and I will meditate on your wonderful works. They will tell of the power of your awesome works, and I will proclaim your great deeds. They will celebrate your abundant goodness and joyfully sing of your righteousness.The LORD is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made (Psalm 145:3-12)

In one of his books, John Muir mistakenly attributed the death of a simple-minded neighbor to the man’s brother who was rumored to have forced him into such hard labor that the physically overtaxed man died and fell forward onto a pile of firewood he was splitting.  Though no names were mentioned, the accused man’s son recognized that it was his father that the naturalist was describing as the abuser.  So the man, then in his seventies like Muir, informed Muir that the rumor was not true—yet still confessing that he, like Muir, had been regularly beaten by his father merely for not working hard enough or meeting his father’s nearly impossible requirements.  Muir felt so bad about the mistake that he had the publisher redo the book galleys.  In a letter to his former neighbor, however, John spoke of his feelings about abusive parenting which grew out of his experience as the oldest son of Daniel Muir:

When the rod is falling on the flesh of a child, and, what may oftentimes be worse, heartbreaking scolding falling on its tender little heart, it makes the whole family seem far from the Kingdom of Heaven. In all the world, I know of nothing more pathetic and deplorable than a broken-hearted child, sobbing itself to sleep after being unjustly punished by a truly pious and conscientious misguided parent. . . .

Your father, like my own, was, I devoutly believe, a sincere Christian, abounding in noble qualities, preaching the Gospel without money or price while working hard for a living, clearing land, blacksmithing, able for anything, and from youth to death never abating one jot his glorious foundational religious enthusiasm. I revere his memory with that of my father and the New England Puritan types of the best American pioneers whose unwavering faith in God’s eternal righteousness forms the basis of our country’s greatness.

Editor of The Life and Letters of John Muir, William Bade, wrote of this incident:

In accordance with a fairly common custom among God-fearing pioneers of earlier days, morning and evening family worship was regularly observed in the Muir household. But how easily morning prayers may become a devastating substitute for a day of real religion was apparently exemplified glaringly in both these households. Under such circumstances children often react sharply, not only against the external forms, but also against the substance of religion. The religious convictions of a shallower nature than John Muir’s would never have survived the bigotry and rigor of his father’s training.  [Emphasis mine].

In spite of the unloving, abusive nature of his father and the ugliness of Daniel Muir’s “Christianity,” John Muir’s writings exude expressions of God’s love and of the unfathomable beauty of God’s creation.  An example of this is Muir’s thoughts on finding a dead Yosemite bear:

Toiling in the treadmills of life we hide from the lessons of Nature.  We gaze morbidly through civilized fog upon our beautiful world clad with seamless beauty, and see ferocious beasts and wastes and deserts.  But savage deserts and beasts and storms are expressions of God’s power inseparably companioned by love.  Civilized man chokes his soul as the heathen Chinese their feet.  We depreciate bears. . . .   They are not companions of men but children of God, and His charity is broad enough for bears. . . .  God bless Yosemite bears! [Read Job 38-41]

To me this sounds a bit like the biblical “naturalist” David who wrote of the Creator, “You bring darkness, it becomes night, and all the beasts of the forest prowl.  The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God.  The sun rises, and they steal away; they return and lie down in their dens.  Then man goes out to his work, to his labor until evening.  How many are your works, O Lord!  In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Psalm 104:20-24).

Daniel Muir’s “Christianity” suffered a great deal from mistaken understandings of biblical truth about the creation.  It seems, however, that even more than a hundred years later, many followers of Christ the Savior are still depreciating the natural world for which Christ the Creator was, in part, crowned with thorns to restore, liberate, reunify, and reconcile to the Father (Acts 3:21; Romans 8:21; Ephesians 1:10; Colossians 1:20).

I’m planning to get back to our standard “three new posts per week” beginning tomorrow.  But today I’d like to ask just one more time for feedback from you.  Surveys may be a “put off” for some (our having received only about 8 responses so far). 

So this time ignore the survey questions.  Just give me a brief comment or two about your thoughts about the Wonder of Creation website (sort of like we did “popcorn prayers” in our youth group!)  Do you like what you’re getting here?  

Here again is my email address in “longhand” to block spammers from obtaining it with their email trolling software: 

d[no space]ohlman at rbc dot org 

Thanks again.  Back to “normal” tomorrow! 

Dean

[Photo: Your host, Grandpa Dean with first granddaughter, Elle]

On yesterday’s survey you were given only one means to respond: via the “comments” box.  But when many of you went to that box, you were asked to logon—and you had forgotten how to do that.  So I think many of you did what I would have done as I rush through my day: just say “O well” and continue to your next task.  All this Internet password and logon stuff drives me bonkers!

So I would like to give you an easier means to reply.  Email me directly with your comments.  I’m putting my email address here in a disguised “longhand” form so spammers can’t find it with their automatic email detecting programs.  Here it is:

d[no space]ohlman at rbc dot org

Now let me repeat the questions so you don’t have to go back to yesterday’s post:

Questions: 

1.  Do you enjoy the WOC content?  If not, what changes would you like to see?
2.  What new content would you enjoy reading and/or viewing?
3.  Do you like the photo content?  If not, what would you like to see different?
4.  Is there anything else you’d like to share to help us in our planning?
5.  Would you be interested in viewing short video clips on the site?
6.  Would you be interested in my adding an informal journal of my nature observations (more like the earlier blog format)? 
7.  Are there any other creation-related topics you’d like to see discussed?

Thanks, 

Dean Ohlman