And for choosing God
Driving to work this week, a hot air balloon drifting across the sky startled me.
Sunrise had streaked everything pink and gold; the dappled texture of the radiant clouds was soft as kittens.
And suddenly, in the midst of all that celestial glory, a hot air balloon.
Improbable orb of primary colors (glaringly mismatched with the delicate splendor in which it hovered), it interrupted the vista so abruptly – drew my gaze so powerfully – that I had to recall myself to the reality of the road before I rear-ended a fellow rubberneck.
Two different trains of thought on that.
First, isn’t it just like us humans to go wrecking God’s best visual artistry?
When we drive to Colorado in the summer, we encounter the ruins of a once-dazzling view of open prairie. Just beyond the “jumping off point” in West Texas, the plain is now crowded with thousands of dizzyingly ugly giant windmills. (You know – the ones that couldn’t keep the lights on during Snowmaggedon, because it wasn’t, um, windy?)
Litter on beaches – trash in the ocean – hydroelectric dams squatting over majestic rivers – humanity’s contribution to the beauty of the earth often resembles graffiti on the Mona Lisa. It spoils Someone Else’s Masterpiece.
This penchant we have for sabotaging the Creation we’ve been entrusted to steward goes beyond just ruining the natural world. We drag the destructive capacity inside, too, don’t we?
God made our minds for wisdom, but we corrupt them with obscenity, frivolity, banality – becoming more foolish as we acclimate to a world we were intended to transform.
God made our hearts to be conduits of His agape love, but we clog them with self-interest and choke them with indifference and they will never know we are Christians by the thin, mean, narcissistic “love” for which we settle.
God gave us life so we could enjoy and glorify Him through disciplined purpose and Kingdom priorities, but we spend our lives pursuing surface pleasures and accumulating stuff and we accept as a matter of course the now-routine phenomenon of epidemics of despair.
None of this is new, of course… William Wordsworth was lamenting the slow creep of fallen-ness at the turn of the 19th century:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Where Wordsworth yearns to be immersed in some mythic pagan past, coaxed out of his despair by the appearance of old gods – we moderns choose instead a fabricated future, all pixels and avatars and encryption, as if that will do the job that Triton’s horn couldn’t.
As if!
But there, in that snarky conflation of Greek divinities with the Metaverse, is our turning point.
The alternative train of thought inserts itself as insistently here as the hot air balloon did on my morning commute:
Both Triton and the internet are creations, too.
Not creations of God, but creations of God’s favorite creatures – God’s adopted children – us.
Train of thought #2:
Isn’t it just like us humans to delight in God’s world by creating – God-like, ourselves – new ways to experience its wonders?
The basket below the hot air balloon carried just-visible human passengers. They rode blithely through the morning, held aloft so improbably and effortlessly. What must they have seen from that extraordinary height?
Were they grateful to God for gifting the Montgolfier brothers with the vision and ingenuity to get hot air balloons off the ground back in 1783?
Did they understand that – even as mere passengers in the basket – they were participants in a small re-making of the morning?
Similarly, the new pictures being delivered by NASA’s Webb Space Telescope increase our awe and wonder at the vastness and gorgeousness of God’s cosmos.
Human curiosity – human inventiveness – human perseverance – all these unique gifts of God to humanity had to be leveraged, together, to devise such an instrument for documenting even a small corner of God’s universe.
And we thrill to the creation of man that has given us such unique access to the Creation of God.
And we thrill – exponentially more acutely – at the Creation of God.
A final example: Much as I rail against the toxic encroachment of social media and internet ubiquity, isn’t this blog a teensy piece of somewhat ironic evidence that connection online CAN point to Jesus IRL (in the real world)?
Technology can (and does) distract terribly from the real world that God has made. But technology also aids and abets efforts to bless that world. Making donations to charities, sending letters to sponsored children in faraway places, telling distant grandbabies that I love them as we look at each other onscreen every week… these are all gifts that technology offers me. Man’s creation amplifies my ability to enjoy and invest in God’s Creation.
Train 1 + Train 2 = Evidence for the Engine Behind Both
Trains of Thought numbers 1 and 2 collide in the certainty that humanity’s propensity for making things worse derives from humanity’s ability to make things at all – and that both our creative and our destructive capacities are gifts from God, governed by another gift from God: our free will.
Free will – that crowning gift – permits us to choose to love Him!
It also allows us to choose to hate Him.
We can choose to create, and bless, and grow up into His image!
We can also choose to destroy, and wound, and unravel ourselves into oblivion.
Choose God, or something else? Make beauty, or unmake it?
Rejoice in the sunrise? Or rail against the hot air balloon – the traffic – the red light?
Humanity has created extraordinary things. Antibiotics and pianos and bicycles and ice cream – books and elastic and submarines and scissors. The Pietá. The Golden Gate Bridge. Fudge.
Humanity has also created extraordinarily horrific things. I won’t name any of them here, because you’ve already encountered them in today’s headlines.
We have to acknowledge that God’s gift of choice is also our burden of responsibility.
We are accountable for the beauty we make (or not); we are liable for the innocence we destroy (or protect).
So, my Friends, may we choose to keep creating.
May we choose to keep noticing and rejoicing in the Creation which is our temporary home – and to keep pursuing the Creator Who is our forever home.
May we choose to reject the lie that what we make of our lives doesn’t matter… and may we choose to reject, too, the innate capacity for destructiveness which each of us carries alongside the ability of creativity.
Knowing the Creator, abiding in Him, creating in cooperation with Him – may we choose THAT collaboration, daily.
For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
Ephesians 2:10
