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Curated Sermon Illustrations on Nature

Explore powerful illustrations on nature. Discover stories, analogies, humor and more as you bring your sermon to life.

Featured Illustration

Creation at Play

Author

Creation as it felt to God — since then every artist has felt an echo, a sympathetic vibration: a craftsman who squints at his finished product and reckons, “Very good”; a performer who cannot suppress a grin when the audience stands and cheers; even a child with her glued-together Popsicle sticks.

Anthropologist and essayist Loren Eiseley tells of a day when he felt the joy of original creation. An old man then, walking a deserted beach, he found shelter from damp fog under the prow of a wrecked boat and promptly fell asleep.

When he opened his eyes, he was looking at the two small neat ears and inquisitive face of a young fox, so young that it had not learned to fear. There, under the boat’s shadow, the distinguished naturalist and the fox pup stared at one another.

And then the tiny fox, a vast and playful humor in his face, selected a chicken bone from a pile and shook it in his teeth.

On impulse Eiseley bent over and grabbed the other end, and the frolic began. Loren Eiseley:

“It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat. Yet here was the thing in the midst of the bones, the wide-eyed innocent fox inviting me to play. The universe was swinging in some fantastic fashion around to present its face, and the face was so small that the universe itself was laughing.
It was not a time for human dignity. “For just a moment I had held the universe at bay by the simple expedient of sitting on my haunches before a fox den and tumbling about with a chicken bone.” It was “the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish,” he later concluded, for in it he had caught at last a glimpse of the universe as it begins for all things. “It was, in reality, a child’s universe, a tiny and laughing universe.”

Despite the awesome emptiness of our universe, despite the pain that haunts it, something lingers, like a scent of old perfume, from that moment of beginnings in Genesis 1.