Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. . . . . They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen (Romans 1:20-25).

Ambling toward the end of my story:

After a number of years doing research on the New Age Movement for Mission India, I began to realize that cults and other alternatives to the Christian faith arise almost as much as the result of failures and weaknesses in the church as they do because of spiritual counterfeiting and appeals to self-worship and the refusal to acknowledge sin. New Agers, for instance, desire close community connections, classless existence, spiritual consciousness, less dependence on technology, money, and consumer goods, more simple living, more sustainable agriculture, more sensitivity to the suffering of animals, more concern about environmental health, more intimacy with the natural world, less wastefulness, and a more holistic existence.

When you examine these particular desires, you find nothing in them that is contrary to the Christian faith or in opposition to biblical ethics. In fact, they point a virtual spotlight on some big holes in the life of the church. If these elements were not missing in the lives of many—if not most—Christians, and if the church had listened to and followed the recommendations of some of its latter-day “prophets” like William Wilberforce, George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Francis Schaeffer, and Os Guinness, we might have rescued thousands who turned away from the faith to the New Age Movement. Even the earlier “anti-establishment” activity of the hippy culture was in part a reaction to Christians whom they believed were fixated on the “American dream” with its material excesses, family and church insularity, consumerism, individualism/independence, “Christian” entertainment, social status, political influence and corporate power, personal ease and economic security.

Hippies and New Agers, generally living closer to the land, were among the first to sound the alarm about the serious degradations of the “environment,” the Creator of which we claimed to worship. And because it was these “pagan” elements of society that expressed care for the environment (just a more utilitarian name for God’s good creation), we Christians (myself included) not only ignored them, we vilified them and even opposed their efforts to make us more creation friendly. It took Ohio’s Cuyahoga River catching fire again in 1969 from oily pollutants to finally catch the attention of some of us (especially via Time Magazine). The next year Tyndale House Publishers, released Francis Schaeffer’s admonition to the church about our creation carelessness: Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology. [Read the key chapter 5 here] This was the same year that the Environmental Protection Agency was formed, and in 1972 Congress enacted the Clean Water Act.

It was Schaeffer’s book—which I only read some twenty years later—and the writings of Lewis and George MacDonald, along with some in-depth Bible study that finally made me a creation-care advocate who wanted to become, like the hippies and New Agers I guess, more intimate with the natural world. The major difference, of course, is that I wanted to respect and care for it as a divine revelation that leaves everyone without excuse in not realizing that it must be the handiwork of an intelligent, all-powerful, personal Creator [See today’s scripture]. So one of the first things I did was to write a confession for myself and for the church for our failures in this important area of concern.

In my next post I would like to share that confession.

Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come. . . . Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing whether it is good or evil (Ecclesiastes 12:1, 13-14).

Continued from the last post:

The OAK Boys nature club of Hastings disbanded in 1954 when our family moved back to Grand Rapids area. Dickie (Richard Andrews) eventually went on to earn a doctorate and became a physicist with the US Department of Energy at Fermilab west of Chicago. Lanny (Lannes Kenfield), sadly, ended up in The Village in New York and made his mark in seedy, profane, and anti-establishment “free love” entertainment. His life ended a few years ago in an apartment a couple blocks from Ground Zero.

I entered my teenage years while living in Grandville, Michigan, and for a while tried to recreate an outdoor club with the “Buck Creek Adventure Boys” (with friends Roger and Gary), but for some reason, interests change at that age! But I continued to be a birdslayer with my BB-gun and then a .22 rifle. One of my last “hunting” acts with Roger was to “bring down” a fox squirrel after shooting it more than 30 times with virtually worn-out air rifles—an act that today still fills me with shame when I recall it: that and the many instances when my attempts to make pets out of wild creatures almost always ended with the death of the animals (like risking my life to climb a tree to take five nestlings out of a crow’s nest, thinking of how neat it would be to have five pet crows! Dumb. Cruel.)

Hunting and fishing, however, did eventually become long-time adult activities for me until our two older boys reached hunting age. Greg enjoyed it for quite some time. Eric, however, fired his new birthday shotgun once and declared, “I don’t want to do this. Can we return the gun to the store?” We did. Greg, David, and I still fish a bit, but we find other ways of enjoying the outdoors more rewarding and less complicated.

Since becoming a creation-care enthusiast some 20 years ago, I’ve often contemplated the meaning of my past outdoor activities. Playing in woods, fields, and streams as a boy seem to have been the most formative of my love of nature, but hunting and fishing significantly increased my outdoor observation and awareness skills. And there’s almost nothing like hunting and fishing with other guys to help create strong and long-lasting male friendships. This is especially significant with boys and their fathers. Few activities can match hunting and fishing as prime bonding activities for fathers and sons. Even though I no longer hunt and now have some significant issues with hunting “for sport,” I find that I typically have more in common with sportsmen than I do with totally “citified” folks. And I also find that it’s very difficult to motivate people who are uncomfortable more than fifty yards away from cars, buildings, and concrete to care more about wild nature.  Most seem to have virtually no internal connection with the natural environment outside the realm of weather.

Even “old-time religion” in the fundamentalist/evangelical vein (my background) seems to militate against caring about and/or for creation. Those reared in this tradition are naturally oriented toward relationships with people—often for the good and soundly biblical purpose of carrying out the Great Commission: bringing folks to Christ and discipling them in the faith. But when you add that to the common partnership of conservative Christians with right-wing politics and laissez-faire, free-market capitalism with its distrust of the “environmental movement,” you have a huge block of citizen consumers in America who can all too easily rationalize away any concern about the state of the environment—even though lack of such concern can be shown to be both biblical and rationally unsound.

So I have to confess that I often feel like the creation-care cause I believe God has called me to champion in my evangelical milieu is mostly a losing cause. This was highlighted for me almost twenty-years ago when a conservative and affluent relative of mine said to me, “Everything you say about creation care may well be true, but you know that no one will actually do anything about it until there’s a crisis.” Now I’m left wondering how many environmental crises there have to be before we actually do “do anything.” Perhaps the statement should have been, “No one will do anything about it until environmental crises actually impact our own wealth and lifestyles.” [Santa Claus poster source]

Next time I’d like to reflect on the role of Christian camps on our attitudes about the outdoors and creation care.

People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:13-15)

Growing up in a small Michigan town in the years immediately following WWII and living in a warm and loving Christian home was in many ways idyllic.  Mom was the typical 50’s homemaker, who accompanied her washing, cleaning, and cooking duties with radio broadcasts from WMBI (the long-range AM station from Moody Bible Institute). Dad was the typical bread-winner, who came home every evening, stopping to pick up the newspaper on the front steps before coming in for supper.

The whole family ate breakfast and supper together (lunch, of course, we kids garnered from our lunch boxes at school), and after supper Dad read to us from Elsie Eggermeier’s Bible Story Book. Afterward, he and Mom read the paper and we kids played or tuned in to comedies or mysteries on the big Motorola console radio.  Bedtime meant bed-side prayers, which always began with “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep.  If I should die before I wake, I pray thee my soul to take.”  That was the school-year routine. [Lunch box photo source.]

But summer—ah, what a joy!  After breakfast, the OAK boys (Ohlman, Andrews, and Kenfield) met briefly to determine the plan for the day—which we would share with our moms, who then simply asked whether we were coming home for lunch or if they needed to pack a sack lunch for us.  Hastings was divided into quadrants, called wards, and the typical rule for kids was this: if you knew your four-digit phone number and knew your address, you were free to roam your ward.  Mom’s knew you were somewhere in the ward unless you asked permission to go to another ward.  Each ward had its own elementary school, so most of your friends were from your ward.

Ours was the First Ward, which was blessed to include a few town-edge farms.  Closest to us was the Kelly farm with probably 80 acres, which included a cornfield, a couple pastures, and a wonderful woods with a muskrat pond, a creek, and an old railroad bed (the former Chicago, Kalamazoo, and Saginaw Railroad—sometimes called by the old-timers the “Cuss, Kick, and Swear” railroad).  We called the now trackless bed “the tramp trail” because hobos sometimes used it to walk from town to town and job to job.  On occasion a tramp would show up at our back door, and Mom would usually give him something to eat on the back stoop, an act that earned our house a hobo mark that indicated that the kind lady living there would give you something to eat. [Chicago, Kalamazoo, and Saginaw Railroad photo source]

We called Kelly’s woods “the grubs,” (our having no idea where that name came from).  But the grubs was where I received my outdoor education and my love for nature.  The OAK boys sometimes spent the entire day there making tree houses or various hideouts, looking for frogs to catch and dispatch so we could eat frog legs (which really do taste like chicken), shinnying up and swinging on saplings, or picking wildflowers to bring home to our moms (Lanny Kenfield’s mom was blind, and she especially loved the fragrant violets).

How I miss those days now—missing them mostly for our grandchildren, who often ask me to tell them stories of my childhood adventures: about the time a captured turtle bit my belly and sent me home screaming in pain as he flopped up and down, about my cocker spaniel tripping up a bull who was chasing us in Kelly’s pasture, about my cutting my foot with a hatchet I had found in the grubs, and so forth.  Sometimes I’m able to take our grandchildren into the woods, but that doesn’t make up for the opportunity of their being free to wander, play, entertain themselves, and become intimate with the woods and pastures.  Kids need to experience—and explore—the outdoors.

About a month ago while walking on a newly-built roadside trail, I did discover a couple boys building a hut in the woods, and it filled me with nostalgia.  Fortunately I had my camera with me and could capture an activity that has now become so rare.  The Wonder Kids page of this website is provided to give parents, grandparents, and other child caregivers tips about getting kids back outdoors and ideas about instructing them in important truths about their Creator and His “other book”—what theologians have termed the “general revelation.”  Nothing electronic can come close in value as an “educator” of children than the wonders of God’s creation.  We gotta get ‘em out there!

I wonder how many children of Christian parents even know that Jesus still lives, that He is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, and that He is the Redeemer who with the Father keeps and eventually takes our souls and will ultimately return those souls to incorruptible bodies that will enjoy endless life on a restored earth.  Teach that to a kid today!

To my dear friend Gaius, whom I love in the truth:  Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well.  It gave me great joy to have some brothers come and tell about your faithfulness to the truth and how you continue to walk in the truth. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth (3 John 1:1-4; the last sentence quoted by my mother on a photo sent to me of my dad and her when I was in college).

I can still picture in my mind the plaster plaque that hung on the wall by the back door of my childhood home. Thanks to the loving grace of my heavenly Father, its message became the cornerstone of my existence: “Only one life; ‘twill soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.” That house at 715 N. East Street in Hastings, Michigan, seemed old when we moved into it in 1945, but it’s still there. [See the story of the pictured plaque here.]

Our family of six lived there for eight years, our dad having become a partner with another Christian man in Hastings Motor Sales, a Dodge and Plymouth auto dealership. Hastings is the county seat—the governmental center of Barry County, a blue-collar region in central West Michigan. A few factories in the town provided the majority of bread-winner jobs. One was the once-famous Hastings Piston Rings Company—a plant about a quarter of a mile from our house, where we kids used to scrounge around for cast off springs that we extended from dowels and shot at birds.

Barry County has numerous lakes and the large Yankee Springs Recreation Area, and it remains a popular hunting and fishing destination. It seemed that anything with fins, feathers, fur, or four feet was fair game. Every hawk I ever saw was a “chicken hawk,” and needed to be shot. Crows were “corn robbers,” and everyone with a gun was doing his civic duty to shoot them—which is probably the reason I never saw a crow close-up until I was an adult!

My two boyhood buddies were Lanny Kenfield and Dickie Andrews. My last name starting with O made the acronym for our trio a natural: the OAK boys. If you’ve seen the popular old movie “A Christmas Story,” you have seen our combined story: I was the one who got his tongue stuck to the pipe in the school playground in mid-winter (on the “jungle-gym”) and had to be rescued by our third-grade teacher, who poured warm water over the pipe and my frost-bitten tongue (I guess that’s another aspect of the adhesive quality of water!).

I think we all had BB-guns by the time we were 10—mine, a Red Ryder model, coming as a surprise Christmas gift just like Ralphie in the movie. And I did almost shoot my eye out a few days later from a BB ricocheting from a piece of metal I was using as a target. Having an air rifle, however, was what started my long love-affair with the outdoors. Looking for prey with fur, feathers, or four feet in farmer Kelly’s woods near our house helped to make me an acute observer of the natural world and inadvertently made me the “nature boy” I’ve continued to be.

My long childhood hours in the outdoors along with “perfect attendance” (with several pins to prove it!) in our Baptist church Sunday-school were critical in what today is called my “spiritual formation.” Having godly and loving Christian parents and the secure home they provided, being free to roam the countryside, and being motivated to eventually go on to a Christian university (Bob Jones University) all cemented in my heart the wonderful words of that gaudy old plaque and eventually led to the awesome privilege I have to host this Wonder of Creation website for RBC Ministries.  RBC, along with the Bible teaching of its founder, M. R. “Doc” DeHaan, were no-doubt the most significant factors in the spiritual formation of my dad and mom, both of them coming to Christ through his ministry and taught for almost four decades by its radio programs and its Our Daily Bread devotional. [M. R. DeHaan photo source at Wheaton College]

If you will indulge me, I’d like share more of my story over the next few posts—and perhaps help make the point that truth from God’s awesome “other book,” the book of His works, ought to be a part of the spiritual formation of all who have placed their faith in Christ the Savior—our Creator.

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it (Hebrews 12:7-11)

A whole different direction for today’s post!  Since people are the most valuable creatures in God’s creation, I’m going to muse on the wonder of creation called “godly father.”  And one of the best ones I knew was my dad.  This is a repost, so I hope long-time readers of WOC will bear with me.

Family and friends remember Dad for almost all good reasons, but one physical feature they all recall was his big hands. Once when we were eating in a restaurant, a waitress stopped and commented, “Goodness, are those your hands? For a second there, I thought you had your feet on the table!” And with that rude remark, she hustled off to the kitchen, leaving Dad in embarrassed silence.

It seems like everyone noticed his large hands. Years after his death, a friend would sometimes say, “My, your dad sure had big hands. Whenever he shook my hand, it almost got lost in his big mitt!” The remarks of friends and relatives, however, were not unkind; they arose naturally out of their memories of a man with a heart as big as his hands.

Henry was born into a family of eight children on a small farm in West Michigan in 1902. And it was the farm that was to shape his life—and his hands. Milking cows, wielding the ax, steering the cultivator, and reining horses helped to develop his stocky frame and broaden the girth of his growing hands. Formal schooling ended for him after eighth grade. The demands of the farm in the years of World War I meant that school could not continue: America needed to feed England and France.

Dad did not marry until age 28, and I, the youngest of four, did not enter the family until he was forty. But soon those big hands were to have a profound impact on my life. With memory’s eye, I can still see Elsie Egermeier’s Bible Story Book cradled in those hands as he read to us after each evening meal. Even now when I read of Noah, Moses, David, or Jonah, I am transported back to those warm and secure times right after World War II.

We kids used to chuckle when Dad’s big, callused fingers struggled with the wispy, thin pages of his Scofield Study Bible. His Bibles wore out rather quickly, but not merely because of his hands: they were tattered by constant use. Along with his giant hands, he had a giant faith. The Bible was his guide in his worship, in his love for Mom, in his concern for others, in his generosity, and in his philosophy of child-rearing and discipline. Dad did not use a belt or a brush or any other implement when it was necessary to apply a little corporal punishment. He used those big hands—hard enough to smart, but never injure.

Many child psychologists, with some justification, claim that parents should not use their hands to spank—for fear that a child might become terrified of their hands. Instead, they claim, some neutral object like a wooden spoon should stand as the symbol of punishment. Then the child will merely fear the object and not the parent. Perhaps this is true in some instances, but since my father was just as quick to use those hands to pick me up, place me on his lap, and embrace me with arms of love and forgiveness, I never cringed in their presence.

Those wonderful big hands, however, did teach me some valuable lessons about God: He is a God of love and mercy, but He is also my heavenly Father who must chasten me when I disobey, push me when I need help getting started, point the way when I need direction, lift me when I must get over the rough spots, stop me when I go astray, and clasp me in love’s embrace when sorrow comes. That’s what I can expect from the hands of God. No follower of Christ needs to fear the big hands of a just but merciful heavenly Father.

My regret is that only one of our three sons knew Dad long enough to remember Bappa’s big hands. To him those hands were the fascinating extensions of a loving heart reflected through twinkling eyes and a broad smile.

When he died at age 72, it was only fitting that Mom should lean over Dad’s casket, touch those hands, and echo the words of Catherine Marshall, “Good night, sweetheart, I’ll see you in the morning.”

I don’t know what Henry’s heavenly body will look like, but I hope God will allow him to keep those wonderful, big hands!