Don’t Hide Inside
I have several friends who don’t like to be outside. Their attitudes, while strange to me, are very common. My friends find being outside uncomfortable: there is no temperature control, insects abound, and the potential to get dirty is high. It’s not necessarily that my friends dislike nature, in fact, I think quite the opposite. It seems more that they see nature as foreign and unpredictable. One friend states in her facebook profile “I’m not outdoorsy but I love the outdoors.” She certainly at least likes the idea of being outside. However, when her romantic notion does not hold up to reality, she retreats and would rather watch it on the Discovery channel. Many Americans today are riding the trend of ‘going green’.
I don’t want to in any way diminish the importance of making ourselves and our homes more environmentally friendly. However, I am extremely concerned with what might happen when Target stores stop carrying “I’m green” t-shirts, when the fad fades. Can this idea transition from a fad into the true lifestyle change that it needs to be? One reason why I am so concerned is because of my friends’ distain for an actual experience of nature. It’s important to ask how much concern we can actually muster for the natural world if our children don’t even enjoy stepping outside. How genuine can this shift be when whole societies feel enormous disconnect from that which they are attempting to protect?
There are other reasons to live in a more environmentally conscious way: finances, self-preservation, etc. But if underlying this movement is not an understanding that the earth is sacred, then the steam in this engine could soon disappear. When asked to remember a time when they felt God’s presence in the world, many people identify encounters with nature, often in dramatic scenery. They report the sense of wonder and awe they felt gazing up at a waterfall, looking out over a mountain range, or feeling the spray of an ocean breeze. They find God in these things and experiences. This has happened to me too, many times. But what I notice is that these experiences do not restrict themselves to the grand- they have a trickle-down effect. Because I had that experience of feeling God in the sunrise, my joy and awareness of God’s presence follows me when the colors fade and I look down at the wildflowers, grass, and insects. My awareness of God in the world bleeds into my daily life. In essence, because I have these encounters with God in nature, I find it much easier to see God in my daily life.
My idea of God in the world is inextricably interwoven with the environment, probably to a fault. These encounters with God through nature have changed both how I understand God and how I understand nature. I believe in the necessity to care for and protect the earth because I see God so firmly rooted within it. And if we are to truly care for ourselves and for our planet, we cannot cut ourselves off from it by hiding indoors. We must get out and experience the world and experience God’s creation all around us. Perhaps where we need to find God most is not in the sunrise, but in unromantic dirt and sweat. The more time I spend outside, the more I want to be outside.
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