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]

In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing:

“This is what Cyrus king of Persia says:

” ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Anyone of his people among you—may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the LORD, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem. And the people of any place where survivors may now be living are to provide him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, and with freewill offerings for the temple of God in Jerusalem.’ “ (Ezra 1:1-4)     [Photo source]

In this fascinating historical account from the Hebrew Scriptures, Cyrus, a pagan king, heard the command of God and obeyed by releasing the captive Judeans to return, according to the prophecy of Jeremiah, and rebuild the temple and eventually resettle their homeland.  Dr. Richard Wright, emeritus professor of biology from Gordon College, coined the term “the Cyrus Principle” to indicate the process by which God often uses unbelievers to accomplish His purposes.  In his book Biology Through the Eyes of Faith, he speaks of this principle in reference to the many non-Christians who have worked diligently to preserve the wonder and integrity of God’s creation and have in essence done what God’s children could have and should have at least been actively involved in.

A prime example of this is the church’s almost universal hostile reaction to the protestation of “hippiedom” during the late sixties directed toward construction, mining, industrial, and agricultural operations that were polluting our waterways—such pollution eventually becoming so great that flammables on the surface of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River actually caught fire in 1969.  The very next year Tyndale House Publishers released the book written by the influential Christian pastor/theologian and pop philosopher Francis Schaeffer, aptly titled Pollution and the Death of Man in which he sided with the hippies and pointed out that the church was both complicit in its lack of care for God’s good creation and negligent in its teaching on the theology of nature.

These protests along with mounting evidence that we were killing the life of our rivers and lakes resulted in our Federal clean water acts of 1972, 1977, and 1987.  A visible and financially beneficial result of such protection for many major cities is that many of our urban rivers now provide great sport fishing and safe water recreation.  I recall as a kid in the fifties that our local Grand River was not grand: it was mostly an industrial, agricultural, and sewage drain that sent huge plumes of crud out into Lake Michigan immediately adjacent to a major swimming beach.  Today anglers fish below the high-rise buildings downtown and land large salmon and steelhead.

[Photo source]

I love seeing that and knowing how much cleaner the river is; but I have to confess that for the first three decades of my adult life (sixties through the eighties) I was, as a political and social conservative, opposed to nearly all environmental regulation and scoffed at the claims of environmental scientists.  And though I was greatly influenced by Schaeffer’s earlier works, I refused to read his book on the Christian view of ecology.  That changed in 1989—a story I will tell later this week.

Now I am ashamed of both my attitude and my behavior and am glad God moved many “Cyrus’s” to do the work that I could have and should have been actively involved in.  I wonder how different things would be today with the Body of Christ if we had given heed to Francis Schaeffer:

On the basis of the fact that there is going to be total redemption in the future, not only of man but of all creation, the Christian who believes the Bible should be the man who—with God’s help and in the power of the Holy Spirit—is treating nature now in the direction of the way nature will be then.  It will not now be perfect, but it must be substantial, or we have missed our calling.  God’s calling to the Christian now, and to the Christian community, in the area of nature—just as it is in the area of personal Christian living in true spirituality—is that we should exhibit a substantial healing here and now between man and nature and nature and itself, as far as Christians can bring it to pass.

[Photo source]

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn; To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified. (Isaiah 61:1-3)

I don’t remember many sermons from my teen years, but I do recall the first time I heard one based on this picturesque prophecy from Isaiah.  “Beauty for ashes” was the theme, and it was about how God will take the negative things in life and turn them into something of beauty.  That, in fact, was what God seemed to do with the modern wilderness prophet John Muir.

Muir House, Martinez, CA

John’s stern and dour father, Daniel, had, among other things and with threat of the rod, compelled his kids to memorize the New Testament and many passages from the Old Testament. Daniel’s fondness for Scripture and meanness toward his children created great discord in their hearts, and John sought to escape as soon as he was old enough.  For the rest of his days, as far as we know, church and formal expressions of the Christian faith were not a part of his life.  But the Scriptures never left him. Nor did his understanding of God’s love expressed in nature.

For the past year I’ve been reading a lot of Muir’s writings—and have come to understand why his works remain popular even after a hundred years.  Besides his elegant prose, analogies, terms, and phrases from the Bible pop up all over in his books.  This Isaiah passage came up in his book The Mountains of California. He was describing the volcano blasted region around Mt. Lassen in Northern California, one of my favorite places.  After commenting on the impact of more recent eruptions on the land surrounding this still active volcano, he spoke of the areas long untouched by lava and ash, which were again vibrant with life:

Less recent craters in great numbers roughen the adjacent region; some of them with lakes in their throats, others overgrown with trees and flowers, Nature in these old hearths and firesides having literally given beauty for ashes.

His use of the term was in fact a continuation of the metaphors used by the Isaiah—the prophet going on to define Israel’s divine purpose:  “that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that He might be glorified.”

It may well be this passage that motivated John Muir himself to glorify the Creator in his life and writings and to, in essence, become the prophet of natural beauty.  The glacier-fed big trees of the Sierra—that I recently saw once again—seemed to overfill his soul with delight, as did the fresher forests of Alaska:

Look at that now! Why, it looks as if these giants of God’s great army had just now marched into their stations; every one placed just right, just right!  What landscape gardening! What a scheme of things!  And to think that [God] should plan to bring us feckless creatures here at the right moment, and then flash such glories at us!  Man. We’re not worthy of such honor!  “Praise God from whom all blessing flow”! [Note that every sentence ends with an exclamation mark.]

Photo source: Cornforth Images

Amen, John!

Watch a YouTube version of the Doxology (“Old Hundredth”)

Photos of the Muir house from my recent trip to California.  Trees among the cinders from a visit to Lava Beds National Monument

Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth, burst into jubilant song with music; 5make music to the Lord with the harp, with the harp and the sound of singing, with trumpets and the blast of the ram’s horn– shout for joy before the Lord, the King. Let the sea resound, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy; let them sing before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples with equity (Psalm 98:4-9)

in Pollution And The Death Of Man: The Christian View Of Ecology, Francis Schaeffer recounted that Charles Darwin near the end of his life found that two things had become dull to him: his joy in the arts and his joy in nature. Schaeffer comments on the irony of this great naturalist losing his enthusiasm for the very thing he had made his life’s calling. Then he continues:

We are seeing today . . . the same loss of joy in our total culture as Darwin personally experienced: first of all in the area of the arts, then in the area of nature. The distressing thing about this is that . . . Christians often really have had no better sense about these things than unbelievers. The death of joy in nature is leading to the death of nature itself (p.11).

Schaeffer also tells the story of visiting a Christian school in the 1960s that was located across a ravine from a “hippie community.” Curious, Schaeffer crossed the ravine to learn more about the settlement. He discovered that the commune was clearly a pagan one—even conducting pagan earth rituals common to the New Age Movement today. But he was also struck with how attractive the community was and how carefully they kept the land. The difference between the grounds of the two communities was extreme.

The leader of the pagan commune even commented to Schaeffer about the “ugliness” of the Christian school. Schaeffer tells of his reaction to that comment:

It was then that I realized what the situation this was. When I stood on the Christian ground and looked at the Bohemian people’s place, it was beautiful. They had even gone to the trouble of running their electric cables under the level of the trees so that they couldn’t be seen. Then I stood on the pagan ground and looked at the Christian community and saw ugliness. That is horrible. Here you have a Christianity that is failing to take into account man’s responsibility and proper relationship to nature (p.42).

Schaeffer’s book was not just another commentary on the decline of Christianity; it was a call to apply biblical principles to the world’s growing environmental problems. It was an invitation to rediscover the wonder of God in creation. It was a reminder that we are not as likely to care for one another if we have forgotten the high calling of God to appreciate and care for all that He has made.

It’s not too late to find joy and renewed worship in an awareness that was expressed by George MacDonald more than a hundred years ago:

If it were not for the outside world, we should have no inside world to understand things by. Least of all could we understand God without these millions of sights and sounds and scents and motions weaving their endless harmonies. They come out from His heart to let us know a little of what is in it (What’s Mine’s Mine, p.29).

The capacity of God’s awesome creation to reveal knowledge of himself and His goodness is so obvious that children are almost the first to notice—something Peter Illyn of Restoring Eden discovered a few years ago when he was out in the wilderness with his young son.  As they were walking, the joy of the experience prompted the boy to say, “You know, Dad, it’s easy to believe in God when you’re outdoors, isn’t it?”  A sermon from the lips of a child.

How long has it been since you’ve let your voice join with the voices of the mountains and rivers singing for joy at the promise that our Redeemer and Creator will indeed come and judge the world with both righteousness and equity.

See you outdoors!

Dean

I’ve had a long love affair with the maple tree.  It started with the three sugar maples that stood in front of our house in Hastings, Michigan.  One of them was a perfect climbing tree that had a particular limb arrangement that made it possible for me to settle into a neat seat with a fine backrest—and far enough out from the trunk that I could bob up and down gently with just slight swings of my legs.  The second tree directly in front of the house was not friendly to climbers: lowest branches too high for me to reach, and the one time I did reach one, it tossed me off and laid me out flat on my back.  The third one was just too big and tall to do much but offer us abundant fall leaves to rake into piles for leaf tumbling and, best of all, leaf burning.

I still remember vividly looking down our street and seeing several neighbors, garden rakes in hand, tending their leaf fires along with us and turning the air “foggy” with wonderfully fragrant leaf smoke.  I understand why cities now have ordinances against leaf burning, but I still miss that old fall ritual.  Marge and I will sometimes take a fall drive into the country and deliberately slow down and open the windows whenever we find that bluish leaf smoke wafting through the cool air—just to create some nostalgia.

Besides offering tough limbs for climbing, the maples, of course, offered their spring sap for the making of syrup.  The nearby town of Vermontville (fittingly named) was famous for its spring maple syrup festival.

In the fall, the maples’ treat is also aesthetic: the flaming glory of its leaves.  Neighborhoods canopied over with green all summer long suddenly reveal subtleties as the chlorophyll production is cut off by lessening daylight—actually by the increasing amount of darkness.  When the green drains away, it leaves behind other pigments that were there all along.  Then the trees and shrubs show their defining fall apparel: brown oaks, yellow ashes, yellow-orange-red sassafras, golden Norway maples, golden-brown elms, burgundy sumacs—and the brilliant red sugar maples.  Because of the glucose content of the sugar maple, the absence of the chlorophyll plus sunlight and cool nights interacts with the sugar in the leaves to make them their brilliant red.

It’s at this time of the year especially that the allusions of the “tree psalms” most speak to my heart and soul (After people, trees are the most mentioned living things in the Bible).

Consider this merry message from Psalm 96:

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
Let the field exult, and everything in it!

Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord.
(vss. 11-12 ESV)

All over the countryside in Michigan, October is the month when the silent song of the trees is most joyous—when we are reminded in spectacular fashion that all created things in their own nature respond to their Maker, making the outdoors a giant cathedral echoing with praise.  In this cathedral we do not worship the creation; we join with all its creatures in “manifold witness” singing together a doxology of praise to our great Creator for His never-ending faithfulness.

[Click on the photos to enlarge them.]

See you outdoors!

Dean