You Are a Very Big God

I wrote this reflection while on a house retreat this past weekend.
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I am sitting by the pond on a bed of moss. It is a beautiful day out. It's cooler than it has been, I've found a patch of shade, and there's a slight breeze rustling through the trees. This side of the pond has something of a path along the edge. At the far corner of the pond, there's a statue of a woman--maybe Mary, though there aren't any features that would necessarily distinguish her as such.

You don't play in the woods as much as I did growing up without forming an attachment with trees, rocks, earth. I'm not really into natural theology, especially in the super-sentimental form in which see I see it a lot these days. But there's something freeing about walking barefoot through grass, something steadying about lying on stone.

You can't totally romanticize it--the last time I went shoeless in grass for an extended period of time, I got chiggers, and an unidentified bug just bit my foot. But I like that fact. Nature provides nourishment of all kinds, but it isn't safe. Sounds familiar. And I think we become less able to connect to the natural world the more we hide from it in glass and concrete, the more we distract ourselves from it with technology. The less we think we need trees and earth and sky, the less we are able to see, to understand, to learn from them.

The song "Indescribable," made famous by Chris Tomlin, was actually written by Laura Storey. Where he sings, "You are amazing, God," she originally wrote, "You are a very big God." I used to make fun of that, but now I think we use the word "amazing" so much that it has lost some of its import. We need to be able, with childlike wonder, to see and be wowed by God's bigness.