Some people feel stuck within their own world these days. The sphere of earthly concerns plagues their minds. To escape, some folks venture into the great outdoors to experience another world, so they can breathe and gain perspective.
According to the October 25, 2020 edition of CBS’ Sunday Morning, that practice is all the rage, during a never-ending pandemic, because people cannot handle the impatience they feel.
Many years before Covid-19, I always felt drawn to leave either my college dorm room, my apartment I lived in as a single person, or our house filled with a wife, daughters, and dogs, to go outside to center myself, when life weighed too much.
A four-mile walk, a bike-ride, or a stroll through some of the 8,000 acres of North Georgia’s deer-populated, Chickamauga Battlefield, still does the trick. But that’s not enough. The scenery provides a backdrop for worship to get my mind off my world onto another one.
Mankind loves to attempt to own things and control things like the virus, election outcomes, and even the climate. But this world isn’t mine, or yours. Yes, we’re supposed to take care of this planet, but isn’t it arrogant to think man in his industry, created 100% of the climate changes we’re witnessing? What caused it? From Paul’s book-Romans:
“For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us.”(8:19-23, NLT, emphasis mine)
God will reverse the damage caused by the original fall of man called sin. That restoration will be not only to humanity but to the natural world.
I loved how a man named Maltbie Babcock kept his perspective during trying times. “He was a pastor in Lockport, New York, located between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, not far from Niagara Falls. Telling his secretary, “I’m going out to see my Father’s World,” he would run or hike a couple of miles into the countryside where he’d lose himself in nature. It was during his pastorate that he wrote a sixteen-stanza poem, each verse beginning with the words, “This is My Father’s World.” And it wasn’t until after Babcock’s death, that his wife revealed it to the world in 1901. (Then Sings My Soul, Robert J. Morgan)
Where do you go to gain an eternal perspective besides the viewpoint inside your head?
Click video below to watch “This is my Fathers World” performed by Fountainview Academy.
pictures courtesy of “Nelson & his Nikon”
watercolor painting by Nelson Haynes
