And if that is not enough...

We were camping earlier this week, stepping outside my comfort zone, being a little bit vulnerable and beyond the grip of the clock or the grid of the internet.  We set up our tent on campsite 56, settling intentionally not just into the wilderness but into endangered spaces of time itself.  

In those moments, I do not require a permission slip or need an excuse to sit in those margins and think and look around me at the wonders of creation.  I can feel the cool breezes that do not come from a ventilation system.  I can sense the warm embrace of an early sun.  I can listen to the concertina of the woods, the chattering of squirrels, the chorus of birds practicing their parts, the rustle of leaves, and the groaning of ancient trees.

I was sitting in my little fold-up camp chair, just sitting there without an agenda, looking upward into a boundless blue that defies description.  And suddenly, Scripture was fleshed out before me.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A passage I had read earlier in God's Word came to life:

For Your steadfast love is great above the heavens, 

Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!  

Let Your glory be over all the earth!  

                                Psalm 108. 4-5 

That kind of steadfast love holds us, that kind of faithfulness we can rely, that kind of glory has no limit.  Words have not yet been invented for that hue of blueness, let alone the magnitude of God translated into language.

But then the trees waved their branches and rustled their leaves as if trying to catch my attention.  Because if the enormity of the heavens is not enough, God also provides an intricate canopy of trees.

For you shall go out with joy,

and be led forth with peace.

The mountains and the hills break forth

before you into singing,

and all the trees of the field shall

                 clap their hands.

                            Isaiah 55. 12

Tish Harrison Warren's new book Prayer in the Night spells out the wonder:

"To believe in something beyond the material world we have to take up practices that form our imagination – and hearts and minds—in light of the resurrection, in light of the possibility that, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning reminds us, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.”

And if that is not enough, surrounded visually by His glory, we can know we are loved by God more than we can realize and grasp.  Just looking up at the vastness of the heavens, we capture but a glimpse of what His steadfast love looks like.

And then go into our day under that great canopy and into that grand chorus.