Seeing More Clearly

With the winter solstice behind us, I woke up with a renewed sense of gratitude, knowing that we're again in a season of each day getting longer and longer, and increasingly bright. But why should that be what gratifies me, and not the knowledge that God designed the changing of the seasons the way he did for a purpose?

I'm not surprised by God's timing in orchestrating that I read the following by John Piper this morning. I realized how, though I often marvel at God's creation on sunny, blue-sky days, I fail to see his hand and purpose in the long dark nights, the wild winds, the rain that waters the earth, and the clouds that bring us shade.

"One of the tragedies of growing up is that we get used to things. It has its good side, of course, since irritations may cease to be irritations. But there is immense loss when we get used to the redness of the rising sun, and the roundness of the moon, and the whiteness of the snow, the wetness of the rain, the blueness of the sky, the buzzing of the bumble bees, the stitching of the crickets, the invisibility of the wind, the unconscious constancy of heart and diaphragm, the weirdness of noses and ears, the number of the grains of sand on a thousand beaches, the never-ceasing crash crash crash of countless waves, and ten million kingly-clad flowers flourishing and withering in woods and mountain valleys where no one sees but God.

I invite you to seek a "freshness of vision," to look, as though it were the first time, not at the empty product of accumulated millennia of aimless evolutionary accidents, but at the personal handiwork of an infinitely strong, creative, and exuberant Artist who made the earth and the sea and everything in them.

O, that we would open our eyes even wider to the glory of God in the world around us!"


Today, I'm opening my eyes to see the beauty of all that God has made, not just the parts I prefer.