Aware and Alive
“…the joy of the Lord is your strength.” Nehemiah 8:10
This weekend Bonita and I celebrated our 29th anniversary by going over to Cumberland Falls State Park. As always, I took my camera with me (I have a very understanding wife!) thinking I might find something to photograph. As we entered the park it was raining and I quickly noticed that everything was green. This is not my favorite time of the year to photograph and I began to think that I’d probably brought my camera along for nothing. Then I began to notice all of the flowers.
Around here we have wildflowers about nine months out of the year. Maybe because they are almost always around I sometimes fail to pay them any attention. This is just another example of ways we can take nature for granted. Some of us have eyes only for the spectacular. We fail to notice and appreciate the simple.
This reminds me of something Sigurd Olson wrote in his book, Open Horizons. He said, “Joys come from simple and natural things, mists over meadows, sunlight on leaves, the path of the moon over water. Even rain and wind and stormy clouds bring joy, just as knowing animals and flowers and where they live. Such things are where you find them, and belong to the aware and alive.”
If we are not careful we will miss out on a lot of the joys God has intended for us in His Creation. Doing so is equivalent to receiving a precious gift from someone and never noticing that it is even there. Creation is God’s gift to us and certainly deserves to be noticed. Recognizing that our joy is at stake, perhaps we should begin each day by praying that God would help us to be “aware and alive” and more cognizant of the “simple and natural things” around us.
–Chuck
(The image above was taken yesterday near the entrance to Cumberland Falls State Park.)