A Look Out Back

This morning as I took a short break from my time with the Lord to look out my window and enjoy the beautiful trees and woods and fresh air he has provided to us every day, I was mesmerized by the motions of the trees. First I would see trees in the distance waving back and forth, then the ones closer would join in, and then after the wind passed, the trees would bounce back and forth a while before they settled back down.

In my mind I wondered what that might be all about. Why did God create the trees? Why did he send the wind as he does, sort of at random places and times? Why does he use the trees as a way to show us the wind when we might not otherwise see it?

Trees-R-Us

Since I’ve been retired God has allowed me to be various places where I have been around plenty of trees and nature. One of the higher priorities for choosing an apartment in the city where my wife and I now live was a view of trees and preferably a woods. God in his great kindness blessed us with such an apartment and view, and I am so grateful for all that means as I have many hours when I can enjoy what he has created more than I could when I had to go to a job every day to make a living.

So I asked God what might be going on out there. God doesn’t waste his efforts, but beautifully intermixes them together if we would only stop and look and listen and smell and enjoy. Of course, not everything is sweet and rosy, but we miss so much God has provided that is free and beautiful.

Antiphony

In my younger days my wife and I sang with a few choirs that sometimes split up groups of people and individuals to cause an effect of spontaneity or echoes or expansiveness. Those arrangements of people and voices often added a dramatic effect both on the singer and on the hearers – an added genuineness and purpose.

As I watched the trees taking their turns waving, I got this picture of them raising their voices to God in praise. Their voices were leaf language and branch language, but their message was unmistakable. Then it got calm, and I wondered if the song was over.

Right in the middle of the symphony, a squirrel popped up on one of the branches wiggling all around and took center stage for a time. Immediately I heard the song in my head, “His yoke is easy and his burden is light” from Handel’s Messiah. It starts out with one section of singers singing about Jesus and his provision to help carry our burdens. Pretty soon another section echoes the phrase and it becomes a duet. And then another section and another, until all are singing and praising Jesus. I watched as the trees sang this song and the birds joined in with them, echoing back and forth and praising Jesus with complete abandon.

God gave me several thoughts about how the wind in the trees is much like his Holy Spirit in our lives, such as how he sends his Spirit here and there to move in the lives of those who are available, and how his Spirit working in some rubs off on others. Another is how the effects of his Spirit in our lives continues after he is poured out on us and causes us to praise God.

Maybe you think I’m a little crazy. That’s okay. I joined in with my heart and sang with them and realized in some small way how all creation was made by God and awaits his every command and is grateful to him for life and all they need to survive. Man seems to be the only one who thinks he is owed something from life and is slow to praise God for all he has done. I know I take so much of what he does for granted.

Nature for the young and the old

I wondered this morning if God made the trees and nature mostly for the young and the old. The young, because each new discovery is a blessing for them. The old, because they are no longer distracted with all the cares of life and have plenty of time to sit alone and think and enjoy God’s nature if they will take the time. Many of the folks in the middle usually don’t have time or even notice nature as they try to cram everything life throws at them into 24 hour days, though some make the effort and are rewarded for it.

One of my favorite poems is by Robert Frost. It is titled “Stopping By The Woods on a Snowy Evening”. It is so simple and short, but captures the feeling I have had many times when I was younger and it was evening and snowing and I was looking at the incredible beauty God created before my eyes with the snow and the trees. One of my best memories in life was a time when we moved away from a town and place of many heartaches, and the night we moved into our house the woods behind us filled up with snow. God let me know he still loved me while he painted a beautiful picture of his love that night just for me.

This morning I was inspired to make my own version of Frost’s poem to express some of what I experienced. Perhaps it might motivate you to find a time and place where you can enjoy God in nature soon and join the chorus praising him as our God and King!

Stopping By the Window on a Sunny Morning

Whose woods these are I’m sure I know
His house is in the heavens though
But he will see me stopping here
To watch the woods fill up with wow.

My aged heart must think it queer
To stop and sit and gratefully peer
Between the sills his brush to make
Another bright new morning in the year.

God gives his trees a little shake
To see if we might be awake
The only sound’s his wind he sent
And praising birds whose voices he did make.

The woods are lovely, bright and deep
And today I could watch them speak
Their earthly choir of leaves and beak
Did praise their God in their way ’til they sleep.