Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these (Luke 12:27).

The photos that accompany this post are of the bluebells of Bluebell Springs, the forty acres of wonder on Orcas Island in Washington State that my brother and sister-in-law are grooming and holding for the joy of family and friends and for the glory of God.

My three weeks there were a bit like being transported for a short time to Eden—making my journey back home over the weekend a bit like going back to East of Eden, in the John Steinbeck mode: living in the midst of a fallen world, and being reminded of it by the cacophony of troubling news and chaos blasting from newspaper racks and airport TV’s.

I am now trying to keep in mind this reminder from George MacDonald:

The appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them.  The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things than they; we see in them, in a distant way, as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen.  It is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths.  What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered from them.  To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it—just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work. . . .

I would not be supposed to depreciate the labors of science, but I say its discoveries are unspeakably less precious than the merest gifts of nature, those which, from morning to night, we take unthinking from her hands.  One day, I trust, we shall be able to enter into their secrets from within them—by natural contact between our heart and theirs.  When we are one with God, we may well understand in an hour things that no man of science, prosecuting his investigations from the surface with all the aids that keenest human intellect can supply, would reach in the longest lifetime.

There exists a mystery in the world, and in all the looks of it—a mystery because of a meaning.  There is a jubilance in every sunrise, a sober sadness in every sunset. There is a whispering of strange secrets in the wind of twilight and an unknown bliss in the song of the lark.

We cannot help but aware of something beyond it all, now and then filling our minds and hearts with wonder, and compelling us to ask, “What can it all mean?”  The flowers live.  They come from the same heart as man himself, and are sent to be his companions and ministers.  There is something divinely magical, because profoundly human, in them.  Our feeling for many of them doubtless comes from certain associations from childhood.  But how did they get hold of us even in childhood?  Why do they enter our souls at all?  It is because the flowers are joyous, inarticulate children, come with vague messages from the Father of all. If I confess that what they say to me sometimes make me weep, how can I call my feeling for them anything but love?

And the flowers are only one example.  All nature, from the mountains to the seas to the fog that hangs so low on the hills, the heather in August, the hot, the cold, the rain—everything speaks, like the flower, messages from God, the Father of the universe.  The eternal may have a thousand forms of which we know nothing yet!

[“God’s Being Reflected in Nature” from Discovering the Character of God compiled by Michael R. Phillips for Bethany House Publishers, pp. 115-117]

The bluebells of Bluebell Springs bloom in precarious places where the land drops off to meet the sea—especially where springs on the flank of Mt. Constitution gather in a pond and then cascade down a steeply graded and fern-filled ravine until they gather once again in a small pool and then drop off and splash into the Georgia Strait at high tide—or upon the polished stones of the shore at low tide.

[Clicking on the photos will bring up larger images.]