Knowing God Through Nature

An authentic way of knowing God is to look deep into nature. Consider the pushing into earth a tiny seed or a gnarled bulb with the promise that fruit of a particular form, color, and taste will burst from the emerging plant form. Amazing. Hundreds of times, without even considering the need for faith, with trowel in hand, I have torn open packages with brilliant images on the labels, and into the dirt I have buried seeds and bulbs, or from cube-sized containers have slid into cold earth a plant the size of my finger. And always–without exception–from an allium bulb has come a tall, onion-like plant, at the top of which is an allium globe; from a tomato plant come yellow blossoms, then tiny, green tomatoes which grow bigger and then turn red (and then I salt them and eat them!); from petunia seeds come glorious delicate petunia flowers . . Genesis 1 says it will be so. Verse 11.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth, and it was so.

Great photographers (and amateur ones) of the world lift camera to eye and embed images on their sensors or on their film; images of grand mountains, immense and mysterious; images of crashing rivers and leaping salmon who somehow know to rush upstream to their own spot for their own spawning; images of lavender fields and great seas and birds who fly south and lady bugs and tulips on the bud. Therein we see God.

Great photographers (and amateur ones, too) lift camera to eye and on their sensors or on their film record the curl of a baby’s finger, the soul of a man as it glows in his eyes, the battered boot of a worker, the gnarled hand of a farmer . . . Therein, we see God.

Yesterday, I heard a loud thump just outside our home. “What was that?” I said to Jerry.

“Just an acorn falling onto the deck.”

So, here in the early days of fall, when green colors fade and begin to glow red and gold and brown, when textures change and a crunching sound is heard beneath our feet because leaves have begun their downward drifting, I will continue my quest of knowing God–because of nature, its repetition, its certainty.

Genesis 8:23

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”