When I look at your heavens........

I'm not a tree hugger but a long drive on a sunny Autumn day enjoying the changing colors does good things for my soul.  Reds, yellows, oranges, browns, magentas - who could imagine such beauty; they are the very vibrancy of life at its fullest in nature.  It brings me joy.

Every season offers a version of this life giving scenery.  The quiet hush of a new snowfall or the crystal magic of ice formed on the trees for winter.  Tulips pushing up through the long frozen soil and the very hint of that spring green as buds begin to appear in the spring.  Or the majesty of layer upon layer of green as field and shrub and trees pulse with life in the summer.  When this world presses in too hard, when the responsibilities become too heavy I find a quick trip to God's own therapeutic creation does me well.

The psalmist felt much the same way

     When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers

          the moon and the stars that you have established;

     what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

          mortals that you care for them?  Ps 8

When God began creating this earth, the moon and the sun, the stars in the heavens;
     When God created the fish of the seas, the plants and animals;
           When God created human beings in God's own image, breathing
                  that first puff of air into that dust creature
                           When on the seventh day God rested and looked it all over,
                            God declared that it was not just good but very good.

 Then God gave it all to us - the humans in charge - as a gift - to care for always.

There was no intention for us to shoot one another on college campuses and local movie theaters.  There was no intention for pockets of poverty so extreme that children who grow up on those streets are almost guaranteed another generation of want.  There was no intention for jails where 14 year old inmates are routinely sent to solitary confinement for weeks on end for minor offenses.  God did not plan the thousand faces of evil and hate and want and suffering that we know, that accompany this life and for which we are culpable.

This God, who made human beings a little lower than the angels and gave to humans the stewardship of this world with all its inhabitants must be weeping in heaven as we turn dominion into domination and rule into ruin........as we waste this beautiful world and destroy one another along the way.

When my phone dings with yet again another Huffington Post alert of disaster and evil, when my soul becomes so heavy I wonder how we will carry on, I turn to the very gift of creation so I might remember that this awfulness is of our own making.  "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established..." I find refuge for a little while.  I am able to hear God a little better away from the maddening crowd.

It's not a solution, but a refuge and the reminder that God's first great gift of love was creation itself.  It turns me again to God which is always a good place to begin.