worldview and perspective on Summer

O God, You amaze us! Summer is the time You designed for thunderstorms. We understand the science because You gave human beings wisdom and curiosity, and the ability to try to figure things out. We un...

What do they know of England, who only England know?

Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined s...

What Value is there in Short-Term Missions?  Over the years, I have had people ask me why my family and I go on short-term mission trips. Some of the more cynical have wondered aloud, “Isn’t it reall...

In a poignant tribute written after his son’s passing in a climbing accident, Nicholas Wolterstorff reflects: When we have overcome absence with phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer he...

Immanuel Kant was one of the greatest philosophers in history. The story goes that he was accustomed to taking long summer walks. One day, he stopped in a park, sat on a bench for several hours, and j...

What we call “nature” isn’t the same nature our great-grandparents knew. Even if they lived as far south as Baltimore, they could cut eighteen-inch blocks of ice off ponds in the winter to cool their ...

A couple years ago I got to take a tour of the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. The name is a bit misleading because what they are most known for are there amazing gardens. And so we were o...

We say that Nature rests, yet she is working like mad. She has only shut up shop and pulled the shutters down; but behind them she is unpacking new goods, and the shelves are becoming so full that the...

It is easier to gaze into the sun, than into the face of the mystery of God. Such is its beauty and its radiance.

These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops,...

O Great Spirit, whose breath gives life to the world, and whose voice is heard in the soft breeze; We need your strength and wisdom. Cause us to walk in beauty. Give us the eyes ever to behold the red...

Lord, we come together in worship knowing all the storms of our lives are still swirling and raging. We invite you to come, speak to our hearts in the same ways you spoke to the waves: “Quiet. Be Stil...

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

“He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-...

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

In his book Thrive in Retirement, Eric Thurman shares the story of close friends preparing for their golden years: My husband was a lawyer who joked that after “the big case” came across his desk, h...

O God, whose reason rules the world, who formed the starry heights above, timeless, time’s chain far forth you hurled, unmoved, gave all things power to move. Prevailed on by no outside cause to fashi...

Leader: The mighty one, God the Lord, speaks and summons the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting. People: Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth. Leader: Our God comes...

J.M. Montgomery’s novel Emily of New Moon has a passage that conveys the attractive and terrifying aspects of the mystery of God: It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, th...

“I’ve made myself vulnerable I’ve let myself care. I’ve opened my firmly closed heart. My safety is gone It’s no longer there My protection is falling apart. Nobody promised Our hearts would be safe O...

…How still the Landscape stands! How nonchalant the hedge! As if the “Resurrection” Were nothing very strange!

Fiction does not ask us to believe things,” he points out, “but to imagine them.” “Imagining the heat of the sun on your back is about as different an activity as can be from believing that it will be...

We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our li...

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Perhaps we look to a screen because it’s too painful to remember we are mortal. To sit in our limits and let them wash over us. To embrace this body, this moment in time, this feeling, or this place. ...

The world is God’s way of bestowing blessings upon us. Our times are ordered by God according to the seasons of the year, according to the seasons of life, according to the needs of the day.

God, our rock and refuge, there are plenty of things that we allow to erode our faith in you. When life gets stormy, we let our uncertainty cloud our trust in you. We think we know better and start re...

O heavenly Father, the author and fountain of all truth, the bottomless sea of all understanding, send, we beg you, your Holy Spirit into our hearts, and lighten our understandings with the beams of y...

If you see a thing whole—it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life is a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You ne...