If We Only Look Around Us...

I have written before that a dear friend gave us Ken Gire's Windows of the Soul as a gift for Christmas, 2001. I will be eternally grateful to her for this gift for I am not the only person I know who feels this book should be sitting right beside your Bible and read frequently to remind us of the beauty all around us. It is right there...right in front of us...but just as we often fail to really "listen" to God and to our fellow man...we often fail to "see" God in the seemingly ordinary and mundane. We are simply too busy, too self-absorbed, too unconcerned...and often just too jaded, cynical or preoccupied with the evil around us.

This weekend I spent three days in a beautiful vacation home in the mountains with four dear friends. It was a planning weekend for the board members of a Christian women's organization I have been part of for about eleven years. This is the third year I have gone to this retreat weekend in the mountains. Each year I am vividly reminded of God's beauty and how easily I can get caught up in just being too busy and too preoccupied that I miss what God has put before me every day.

I think it is important to take a moment for retreat every so often. It doesnt have to be costly. It can simply be a walk in the woods. Dan and I did that just last night when I returned home from this trip. We simply walked side-by-side on our walking trails through the woods talking about the joy we find just seeing what is around us. Planning out how we can create more beauty and peace on our own property.

The leaves in the mountains were amazing this weekend. I marveled at the beauty. I took pictures; I picked up leaves to bring home to press for yet another project I want to create. I laughed with friends. We wandered through a country cemetery and read headstones while conjuring up stories we felt seemed appropriate for the long ago departed. We picked up moss-covered rocks and tree bark and considered how they could be used in creating more beauty in our own yards. One of our ladies finds joy in making flower arrangements and is quite talented. She picked up vines, pine boughs, twigs of bright yellow, orange and red leaves and tall grasses and made a beautiful arrangement when we got back to the house. Didnt cost a nickel but looked like a million bucks and blessed our souls. Another friend and I wandered through an abandoned house we thought would make a darling get-away cottage and we pondered the idea of checking into it further. "Making a silk purse out of a sow's ear" as my mother used to say. Our imaginations took us away.

Van Gogh said, "All nature seems to speak. As for me, I cannot understand why everybody does not see it or feel it; nature or God does it for everyone who has eyes and ears and a heart to understand." Ken Gire goes on to say, "In our search for God, Nature is one of the places we look and one of the places He looks for us, reaches to us. If, indeed, Nature is one of the cognate languages of God, it seems only logical it would be one of the languages we should study."

This weekend I "studied" Nature and found God in every nook and cranny. When we are searching for Him actively, we find Him in everything around us. When we are constantly being wary of evil, we find evil all around us. Perhaps it is like finding the glass half empty or half full. I choose to search out beauty and I find it in abundance. I hope you do too!

God's words are underneath everything. And if you listen carefully, you will hear them. Ken Gire, Windows of the Soul (Zondervan, 1996)


Joanne F. Miller
November 19, 2007