Lent: Wild Beauty

For the beauty of the earth

For the Glory of the skies, 

For the love which from our birth

Over and around us lies: 

Lord of all, to Thee we raise

this our hymn of grateful praise.

One of the most thrilling, most frightening, most rustically beautiful places on earth is the deep woods of Canada.  My head floods with memories of the place four hours north of the border...an island my Opa bought in 1950 for $500 on a remote lake in the Ontario wilderness.  I went there over and over again in the summers of my youth, and I'm sure I'll be able to recall a thousand childhood moments when I'm old and frail and can't remember the way to the store.  

I love the smell of gasoline because Opa would fill the motor tank before the long trek from portage to island, splashing little rainbows into the shallows.  I love cliffs that echo and carpets of pine needles and blueberries off the bush and magnificent storms over the waters.  I love stepping off a slick rock into clear, cold waters.  These are a few of my favorite things, as Maria would sing.  

Yes, this is me looking like a bro.

One year, something in the night scared me.  I brought home recurring nightmares that hung over my sleep for many years...some unseen monster looming in my house.  As I said, it could be a frightening place, like the day I met up with a bear on the beach. We went our separate ways, thankfully.

Another year, burning embers floated on the wind and ignited my favorite tinder-dry pine tree, and within hours, all of it, everything Opa and our family built, was gone.  The vinyl siding on the cabin melted like snakes lying in wait among the smoking remains of our memories.  That was a sad year.  Opa never went back once it was beautiful again, which took about 15 years.  My dad and uncle return yearly, though, and have rebuilt.  

I learned my first lesson about God in that place.  I learned that when a person lays down on a rock under a cathedral of stars far removed from civilization, there is no chance of believing it is all random and meaningless.  God formed this wildly imaginative earth, flung the stars into space, and said, "Jill, this is for you.  Find me in it.  Thank me for it.  Worship me from it."  

It took me another decade to embrace the story of Christ, and now I see Him in the first bud of Spring and in the crushed leaves of fall.  I see Him in the towering cedars that point heavenward and in the tiny seed that seems so lifeless and dry but holds everything within it to accomplish its purpose.  

Today I sing the hymn of Folliot Pierpont, a fellow nature-lover, song-writer, God-worshipper.

For the beauty of each hour

Of the day and of the night, 

Hill and vale and tree and flow'r 

Sun and Moon and stars of light 

Lord of all, to Thee we raise

this our hymn of grateful praise.