These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life. Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, promised you.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up (Deuteronomy 6:1-6).

Children’s children are a crown to the aged, and parents are the pride of their children (Proverbs 17:6).

Let me tell you about life on Ellavia.  Ellavia is a small island on the shore of the east arm of Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay—about 100 feet long and 50 feet wide.  It’s inhabited mostly by herring gulls and mallards—and briefly by two little girls: Ava and Elle.  The girls did not live long on it—less than an hour.  The island, which really was not an island but a small spit of land, is now a vital part of Elle and Ava’s memories.  They had claimed the “island” after braving the current of a small stream that emptied into the bay, leaving Grandpa and Grandma Ohlman on the other side not particularly wanting to drench pants and shoes before getting back into the van.

The first order of business when you claim an island is to name it.  Elle suggested that they certainly must include the discoverers’ names in its designation; so Ava proposed “Ellava.”  But, with perhaps some placename pattern in mind, she changed the suggestion to “Ellavia.” It was immediately and enthusiastically agreed on by both that such was a most excellent name.

With a stick, a found child’s beach pail and shovel, and a half a loaf of sliced bread they explored the island, collected clam and zebra mussel shells from the creek and surf line, and fed the inhabitants—saying angry words at piggish gulls who wouldn’t share with a pair of mallards.  Having a sandy lake shore, an infinite horizon, a creek on which fresh beaver-clipped branches floated, an ample hill with steep drop-off to the creek, and sand to dig in, it was a momentary paradise in which they found joy—their time in Eden.  The only enticement sufficient to get the granddaughters back off the spit was the promise of the indoor pool at the motel.  But Ellavia was now in their hearts and on their minds, and we heard it mentioned frequently during the rest of our grandparent/grandchild weekend getaway.

This adventure reminded me afresh that the outdoors—God’s other book—captivates children and dramatically reduces the tensions our modern world and hectic lifestyles creates for them.  Why is it that when we wean children from milk, we also want to wean them from their feelings of natural connection to God’s good earth? Not deliberately, yet surely, we stifle those feelings and break those links.

My heart aches for children today who are not given the opportunity I had as a child growing up with free and safe access to woods, pastures, ponds, creeks. This is especially poignant for me in the spring when joy fills my heart and nostalgia grips my emotions as I wander anew among the born-again violets, adder’s tongue (trout lily), trillium, skunk cabbage, and marsh marigolds in the April woods and marshes.  Still vivid in my memory is making handled cones out of construction paper in school the day before May 1 and then filling them with wildflowers to take home or hang on the knob of a nearby widow’s front door.   We’d knock boldly on her door shouting “May Day, May Day!” and quickly hide in the bushes to see her open the door to discover not a visitor but a floral delight already wilting from the grip of our hot and grubby little hands.

Our children need the outdoors.  They need intimacy with it.  We know we are to teach them the “decrees, commands, and laws” of the Scripture—God’s special revelation.  But the facts, wonders, and wisdom that come from nature—the Creator’s general revelation—are also vital.  Sunday School at church is  important, but Saturday School in God’s great outdoors also provides wonderful, even everlasting, rewards.

Understand it, harried parents!  Get it, busy grandparents, aunts, and uncles!

The Wonder Kid’s page of this website offers suggestions about how adult caregivers can create wonderful memories and provide essential understanding of the creation to children.  It is intended to be an interactive page where you can provide suggestions of your own.  If you have forgotten how to register on the WOC site to make comments, you can send me a suggestion on Facebook (search “Dean Ohlman” there) or you can email me at RBC using “dohlman at rbc dot org.”

Be sure to check into the Children and Nature Network if you want learn more about curing kids of their NDD: nature deficit disorder.

If a couple readers of WOC have a desire to be regular “Wonder Kids” associates who would like to research children and nature connections and ideas and share them on the site, I’d love to have you contact me. –Dean

Observe the commands of the LORD your God, walking in his ways and revering him. For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land—a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills. When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the LORD your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the LORD your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day (Deut. 8:6-11)

I’ve been thinking lately about how fundamentally different the human relationship with the earth was when the Scriptures were written from our relationship to the earth today.  First, I feel we are often as blinded to the state of God’s creation today as we are blinded to the way people actually saw God’s creation in Bible times.   Henry Van Dyke, who wrote the lyrics to “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore You” to a musical theme in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the story The Other Wise Man, came to an interesting conclusion about the Christian faith.  In a journal of his trip to the Holy Land, Van Dyke wrote this:

A new conviction—new at least to me—[is] that Christianity is an out-of-doors religion. From the birth in the grotto at Bethlehem (where Joseph and Mary took refuge because there was no room for them in the inn) to the crowning death on the hill of Calvary outside the city wall, all of its important events took place out-of-doors. Except the discourse in the upper chamber at Jerusalem all of [Jesus’] great words, from the Sermon on the Mount to the last commission to the disciples, were spoken in the open air. How shall we understand it unless we carry it under the free sky and interpret it in the companionship of nature?

I think that Van Dyke hints here at the reason God’s people (the church) today seems so separated from the out-of-doors and from the importance of “the companionship of nature.”  We’ve lost our out-of-doors consciousness.  We’re now so insulated and isolated from the natural world that we do not make the simple connections between ourselves and the creation that were naturally made by people living in Bible times.  The resulting alienation has led moderns to conclude that the Bible does not say much about the relationship we ought to have with the created world—other than to repeat that “God gave us dominion over the creation,” the meaning of which is seldom considered in depth.  I believe, however, that servants of the Lord from the time of Abraham to the Industrial Revolution would be shocked at our ignorance of, careless use of, and lack of appreciation for the natural world that demonstrates to all mankind the Creator’s “eternal power and divine nature” (Romans 1:20).

Think of then: The ancients tilled the soil. They harvested and milled grains. They kept fruit orchards, olive groves, and vineyards.  They fished and cured fish.  They cut timber and milled timber.  They mined and refined.  They made paper.  They quarried and cut stone.  They kept and used animals for food, for leather and textiles, for work, and for transportation.  They built shelter from the elements. They prepared their own food.  They made their own clothing.  They prepared as best as they could to meet all the constraints of local weather and landscape. And they created art to reflect and celebrate God’s provision of all of this through what He created. To do all of this they were required to have intimacy with the natural world.  Because of their almost universal familiarity with the land, anyone could see when the natural sources of life were threatened by human carelessness, waste, abuse, destructive competition, and by the elements themselves.

Think of now: All of these activities are still necessary, but most of them continue outside the attention of the vast majority of people who depend upon them.  Who tends our soil, develops and plants seed, harvests, mills, and produces food products?  Who tends the ocean fisheries?  Who tends the mining and refining of minerals?  Who cuts and mills timber for wood products and paper?  Who husbands meat animals and provides milk and eggs?  Who makes our clothing?  Who processes and markets our food?  The answer is that the majority of these necessary vital processes are done out of sight and mind of most of us—by a few of us whose prime motive is not land stewardship but short-term monetary profit. Cocooned in home, car, and office, we migrants from the land simply trust that all these fundamental human activities are being carried out in a stewardly manner that will sustain the health of the creation for our descendants.  Even those of us who call ourselves conservative are pretty clueless about conservation.

Is it any wonder, then, that we become blind to both the wonder and beauty of the creation—as well as to its health?  People have sometimes said to me, “Be realistic; we can’t go back to living off the land.”  My reply is, “Be realistic; we are living off the land—and more intensely than we ever have  The problem is that we are not living on the land as our ancestors did.  As a result we have little understanding of how it all works and seem to have lost our inherent love and appreciation of it. We are no longer intimate with the out-of-doors.  Therefore until environmental crises arise, we typically have no idea about what our economically appointed land, air, and water “developers” are doing to it and with it. And, strangely, we seem to get upset if anyone paying attention to the land, air, and water reports that things are not going well with them.  The truth, however, is that God has never let any of us off the hook of being stewards of the “good land” He has given us.

If Christianity is an out-of-doors religion as Van Dyke suggests, then I think it would be wise for us to go outdoors and examine the state of God’s creation and become more intimate with it.  Short of that, let’s at least respect our environmental watchdogs.  Because of them my childhood dream of actually seeing a bald eagle is fulfilled regularly, pileated woodpeckers I never knew existed as a kid sound off in nearby woods, and salmon are caught in the Grand River—a reality beyond imagination when I was growing up.

The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the man he had made. The Lord God made all sorts of trees grow up from the ground—trees that were beautiful and that produced delicious fruit (Genesis 2:8-9).

I keep coming back to this passage in my contemplation of the wonder of creation because it seems so fundamental to a biblical theology of nature.  To help me think about the meaning of nature, I’ve been plodding through the first book of Alister McGrath’s Scientific Theology: Nature. And I mean plodding! Whew, it’s heavy.  Which I suppose you’d expect from a former professor of historical theology at Oxford.  I’ve used the New Living Translation version of this Scripture because it sets out so plainly the fact that the first thing said about the trees of the Garden of Eden is that they were beautiful.

In this passage beauty comes before utility (usefulness). Now it’s risky to draw set theological principles merely from order of appearance, so I’d be reluctant to say that the Bible indicates that the beauty of God’s creation is more important than its usefulness.  After all, if the created things were not useful, Adam would not have survived!  But just the fact that the concept of beauty comes right in on the heels  of God’s declaring the creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31) means to me that as creatures made in God’s image, something resonates within our souls when we come into the presence of something beautiful.  So for one attuned to God, the first experience of Yosemite or Yellowstone would likely cause us to pause and reflect, “This is awesomely beautiful,” and not muse, “Wow, think of how much energy we could generate by putting a dam here or building some geothermal power plants here.”

There’s a sense in which the counter-play between beauty and utility seems to reflect our human spiritual and material natures.  We have both natures and we need to be sensitive to both.  And guiding us in our sensitivity is the reality that the material things we must use are also the handiwork of God and they have inherent goodness.  Maintaining the goodness and beauty of material things as we use them ought to be one of our principle aims as His stewards.  Think of a lovingly prepared and beautifully presented Thanksgiving meal in comparison to a chicken bucket from Colonel Sanders!

On the subject of beauty McGrath quotes both Augustine and C. S. Lewis (about a 1600-year spread there!)  Augustine believed that there was “a natural progression from an admiration of the beautiful things of the world to the worship of the One who created these things, and whose beauty was reflected in them.”

What is beauty?  What is it that charms us and attracts us to the things that we love?  It must be the grace and loveliness which is inherent in Him; otherwise they would in no way draw us to them.

McGrath points out  that Lewis “affirms the existence of beauty within the created order, while simultaneously stressing that beauty is intended to lead the beholder to the origins and ground of that created beauty in the Creator.”  I particularly appreciate the quotation of Bonaventure:

The creatures of the world lead the souls of the wise and contemplative to the eternal God, since they are shadows, echoes, and pictures. . . of the productive, exemplary, and order-inducing art [of the Creator].  They are set before us in order that we might know God . . . .  Every creature is by its very nature a kind of depiction and likeness of that eternal wisdom.

So my conclusion is that exposing ourselves to and being sensitive to the beauty of the creation is in large part a spiritual endeavor that will draw us toward our Creator.  It’s a spiritually fruitful practice that we moderns perform much too rarely.  Lewis, however, reminds us in The Weight of Glory to understand that beautiful things are merely hints of what is to come:

[Beautiful things] are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of the worshippers.  For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of the flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.

We are promised in the Word that one day that flower, that tune, and that news will be a reality.  In the meanwhile these awesome hints fill us with hope (Romans 8:18-23).

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