Seeing Creation

I, like everyone else, have been saddened by the devastation caused by the recent hurricanes. Of the three major ones to hit, Irma got special attention from my wife and I. All of my wife’s family lives in Florida and we also have a number of friends who live there. We anxiously awaited news from our loved ones as the storm approached and rolled through the state. You can’t help but worry about your loved ones when they are in harm’s way.

I have to admit that the people of Florida were not my only concern. As someone who has photographed the wildlife of the Sunshine State numerous times I wondered how the fauna would be affected by the hurricane. At first I concentrated on the birds of southern Florida, especially in the Everglades. Would they be able to survive the incredibly strong winds of the storm? Later, I thought about all the alligators there and wondered how they would be affected. I hoped they too would be able to survive.

I have to admit my concern for the alligators was influenced by something I had recently read from John Muir’s writings. Here’s what Muir wrote: “Many good people believe that alligators were created by the Devil, thus accounting for their all-consuming appetite and ugliness. But doubtless these creatures are happy and fill the place assigned them by the great Creator of us all. Fierce and cruel they appear to us, but beautiful in the eyes of God. They, also, are his children, for He hears their cries, cares for them tenderly, and provides their daily bread… How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! how blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!…alligators, snakes…are part of God’s family unfallen, undepraved, and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth.”

I watched a good bit of the news coverage of Hurricane Irma and don’t recall the storm’s effect on wildlife being mentioned once. It made me wonder if anyone cared.   I certainly understand why the primary focus was on the storm’s impact on humans but I’d like to think that there were others beside myself that were concerned about the wildlife of the area. I’m sure there were. And, if not, I can rest knowing God was concerned.

The Bible reveals that God is the author of all life and that all life matters to God. We are no doubt more picky about what we consider important but if God loves and cares for all of Creation shouldn’t we? Even the alligators and snakes mentioned by Muir should concern us for they are our fellow-creatures. So the next time another storm threatens I hope you will lift up a prayer not only for the humans at risks but also for our other brothers and sisters–the wildlife we share this planet with. The Psalmist declares to God, “How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.” (Ps. 104:24) Let’s not forget to show our concern for the rest of God’s Creation. God certainly cares for them and so should we.

–Chuck

(The pictures shown here are some I’ve taken in southern Florida.)

I have spent the past few days photographing the wonders of God’s Creation found in southern Florida.   Most of my time was spent in Everglades National Park. It has been a truly marvelous experience.   Each day we were treated to some incredible sights and sounds. We saw a baby barred owl feeding on a snake its mother had brought it. Twice we watched a male osprey bring a fish into the nest for its three chicks. Each day we observed numerous species of birds gather together in a small pool of water to feed. Everyday there were also alligators gliding smoothly through the water and three times we got to observe the once threatened American crocodile. Throughout the Everglades we saw beautiful wildflowers. We passed along the road dwarf cypress trees that despite their diminutive size were over a hundred years old. And then there were all the sounds of nature to delight the ears—bird song, alligators bellowing, the wind blowing through the river of grass.

The Florida Everglades is a unique and wonderful place. It may not receive the visitation that many of the more popular national parks do but it truly is one of America’s great natural treasures. The sad thing is that it is also America’s most endangered national park. Only a small fraction of the original Everglades still exists. Southern Florida is a heavily developed and populated area. This has not just reduced the size of the Everglades but disrupted the flow of water that its life depends on. Thankfully, there have been and continue to be many conservationists who are committed to protecting and preserving what is left of the Everglades.

After spending almost a week in the Everglades I just cannot imagine our planet without such a place. The Everglades is a showcase for many of God’s wonderful creatures. It is a place where the story of Creation continues and the beauty of God is made manifest.

I told the friend I’m traveling with yesterday that it seemed like nature was putting on a show for us each day. If you can call God’s Creation a show then I insist the show must go on. We truly do need to do everything we can to preserve places like the Everglades. I honestly believe we have a divine calling to do so. Christians have for centuries emphasized the importance of the Great Commission found at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. I agree that reaching others with the good news of God’s love is critical but I also believe that we have not paid nearly enough attention to what I like to call “the other Great Commission.” In Genesis 2:15 we read, “Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.” This, too, is our commission. This, too, is our task.

In the story of Creation, just as in the stories found in the Scriptures, God’s love and beauty are revealed. They are made known in the many “shows” nature puts on for us daily. If we do not take more seriously the “other Great Commission” then many of these marvelous and exquisite shows will cease to be played. We can’t let that happen. The show MUST go on!

–Chuck

Florida is a fascinating place. I was there for a conference last week and took some time to also visit the Everglades. I was not in the national park. The Everglades is a much larger area than the park. It’s headwaters starts up near Disneyworld and is a broad, very shallow, very slow moving river going south of Lake Okeechobee.  Or at least it was. Over the years it has been pretty badly treated, being chopped up with drainage canals, polluted with agricultural runoff, rivers channelized, the soil destroyed and the usual sort of damage we can do to a natural ecosystem. A lot of work has been done in recent years to undo the damage (which also affects the water system of the big cities along the SE coast), though there is still much to be done, and the costs to repair the damage will far more exceed the costs incurred doing that damage.

A simplified history: almost 200 years ago, a number of influential northerners came to Florida and fell in love with the warm climate. The problem was there were already people here farming the north – the military ran those “inconvenient” Native Americans off into the Everglades. Then a few years later, those new arrivals began to plot the drainage of the Everglades itself to make the land useful in their terms. And they felt it was God’s will for them to change this “wasted land” into something productive (never mind that this land was extremely productive in terms of wildlife, productive beyond what most people had ever seen). Of course, they often invoked the idea that man was to have “dominion” over the earth. If we saw a man brutally abusing a woman because he supposedly had “dominion” over her, we would lock him up for a long time in prison, though I suppose for the times, people sometimes thought it was okay for man to do that too. I hope we have come much further today in both our connections to fellow human beings and the natural world that is our home.

In the late 1800s, Governor Broward said, “The Everglades should be saved. They should be drained and made fit for cultivation.”  Many people of the time felt it was God’s will for man to “tame the wilderness” anywhere they could. The word “saved” was not chosen at random. The Census Bureau at the time announced settlement of the West as so much land “redeemed” from the wilderness. Redeemed also had religious overtones.

It took a long time, but by the 1960s, technology and engineering succeeded in draining parts of the Everglades … and thoroughly messing it up.  One has to wonder a bit about all of this. These were largely folks who believed in God and religion. They saw no problem in totally changing something of God’s Creation and in labeling such Creation as worthless.  How often have we been arrogant about our abilities to do things “better” than God? We definitely don’t put it in those terms, but all too often we are more interested in what we can take from God’s Creation than we are in what we can learn from His work.

The Everglades was and is a very complex ecosystem. Arrogantly, men (and I use the term deliberately because it was almost all men) felt they could change a landscape that was functioning perfectly as it was. They knew better than the Maker, evidently, yet over time, such arrogance has been more than a bit of a problem. As water drained, wet muck dried and became susceptible to fires whose smoke blackened Miami (Broward “knew” that fires were not possible). As water drained, the natural water tables were strongly affected and folks along the coast found their water systems were being invaded by salt water.

I know we look at things with a different perspective today, but it is still more than a bit amazing that if folks believed God created the world (and they did), that they would not pause at least a little to understand His world better before tearing it apart.

Have we learned? I don’t know. I still hear a lot of people making claims about our world that seem to be based a lot more on what they want to happen rather than a real understanding of the world God has given us. They choose to believe what benefits them rather than what is written in God’s own hand, His Creation. I am constantly surprised and filled with awe at the amazing complexity of our natural world that has long worked so well without any of man’s help. Maybe that is because God does not need our help to make nature do its best, and our role as stewards of what God has entrusted to us has a spotty record. I believe we can and must do better to honor God’s Creation and to “use” the world as God made it, not as we think it should be used because we know better.

— Rob

You probably noticed that Chuck and I just spent a little time photographing in the northern reaches of the Everglades in Florida up by West Palm Beach. A lot of people think the Everglades is just the national park, but it is an ecosystem that goes far beyond the park, which is one of its challenges. While in Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, I picked up a book, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise by Michael Grunwald. This is a fascinating history of the entire Everglades drainage which begins up near Orlando. I am only part way through it, but it is filled with history and how people deal with land they don’t understand.

It is very interesting that a lot of people going to Florida early on thought the Everglades was a desolate and worthless swamp. Then as America annexed the land, developers moved to the area and were determined to drain this “worthless swamp” so that people could live and farm there in the rich soil (it actually wasn’t rich), beautiful weather (they didn’t mention the storms), and lovely conditions of mild winter (they also did not mention the bugs, especially mosquitoes). And there were folks who sincerely felt that God wanted them to subdue this landscape and make it profitable for man.

Times have changed and today people realize what a treasure the Everglades is, but how messed up it got by people trying to drain it. Those were different times when folks like Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward promised in 1904 to create an “Empire of the Everglades,” by wringing the last drop of water out of that “pestilence-ridden swamp.” It was a time when man could do anything and certainly a worthless swamp was not something to care about.

Consider this. If we believe God has created this stunning world of ours, and His work is good, then having an attitude like that goes against God. It essentially says that God must be stupid to have made such a terrible place. The folks of the time believed God gave them a mandate to conquer the earth, though I am not sure this was not a bit of human arrogance. The Bible says we were made in the image of God, but it seems like people often make God in the image of themselves to justify all sorts of assaults on the planet and nature. The excuse people had was that these places were places of evil, not of God, but that is an excuse born of how people viewed nature, not a real look at nature.

People still do this today for swamps and wetlands because they seem like places that do nothing for man. Perhaps it would be better to see what they do for God, and how they truly do glorify God when we open our eyes to what is really there. The Everglades is such a good example of this. It truly is a place of connections, amazing connections between animals and plants that have everything to do with beauty and God’s amazing capabilities and nothing to do with evil or worthlessness.

A very simple example: Alligators create holes in the wetlands that create places other animals come to during dry spells. This helps the system survive even when conditions are not at the best. These gator holes are like Noah’s arks, but for dry conditions in a wet landscape. That is a pretty remarkable way this system has been put together.

Or just look at how slight variations in water change what grows in places and how things adapt. Places where the water is deep (which is very relative since water is rarely very deep anywhere in the Everglades or most other swamps), the water is open and has water lilies growing there. As the water gets shallower, sawgrass and rushes grow, then cypress, a tree that can handle wet roots. Each grouping of plants and habitat creates a unique habitat for wildlife, too, so anhingas will be in the sloughs where the water is deeper, herons in the shallower water because they don’t like to get their bellies wet, raccoons in places where the ground gets drier, and so forth. There are also very dry places, tree islands, where animals like Florida panthers and black bear live. Each place is a well-connected system of interdependent parts that, to me, says that God is pretty amazing to have structured a world like this.

As Chuck has said many times, nature is God’s “other book,” a book where He has written directly. We might not understand everything in that book, but simply not understanding is no excuse to write it off as unimportant. Then we truly are trying to make God in our image because we want a small God that only does things we understand. I am pleased to know a much bigger God who does amazing things that can be difficult to understand, but provide us with a stunning world if we are only open to all of its possibilities.

The images you see hear are all in the Northern Everglades: lily pads in Grassy Waters Nature Preserve, swamp lily in Loxahatchee Wildlife National Refuge, varied habitats in Grassy Waters and ferns in a cypress swamp in Loxahatchee.

— Rob

At the end of December I spent a few days visiting my in-laws in the panhandle of Florida.  While there I drove over to Blackwater River State Park to do some photography.  The picture above is one I took almost as soon as I entered the park.   This scene caught my eye because of the contrast it presented with my last visit to this park a few years ago.  On that trip this same area had just experienced a prescribed burn.  The longleaf pines that live in this area depend on such fires for survival.   On this most recent visit the forest certainly seemed healthy.   Many people have trouble comprehending how fires can be good for a forest but in situations like this they truly are.

About the same time I visited Blackwater River State Park I was preparing to preach a sermon on the apostle Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” mentioned in Second Corinthians 12:7.  We do not know for certain the precise nature of Paul’s “thorn.”  Whatever it was, it was excruciatingly painful.  The Greek word translated “thorn” was used to describe a stake upon which one might be impaled.   Paul prayed three times that God might remove whatever was causing him pain but God chose not to.  He told Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  Rather than be disheartened by this Paul said that he would boast all the more gladly about his weaknesses so that Christ’s power may rest on him.

Pain and suffering, like fire in a forest, may seem to be a strange blessing but it can be one nonetheless.  I know of few spiritual giants, past or present, who have not had to suffer much.  Pain and suffering has a way of causing one to turn to and rely on God.  When we do so we discover, like Paul, that God’s grace truly is sufficient.   In our weakness we experience God’s power in ways we might not otherwise. 

I confess that God’s ways are often mysterious.  He can use fires to make forests healthier.  He can use pain and suffering to make us stronger and draw us closer to Him.  He truly is an amazing God!

                                                                                                                                        –Chuck

(The bottom picture shows Blackwater River.  Its dark color is caused by tanins.  It is one of the purest sand-bottom rivers in the country.)