Rachel Starr Thomson

I live in a city famous for air pollution, across the river from a horrendously run-down section of Detroit. My neighborhood is decorated by abandoned shopping carts and graffiti. Two years ago the city workers went on strike for nearly the entire summer, and as weeds grew waist-high in our public parks and walking trails, the air was filled with the buzz of flies and wafting smells from temporary garbage dumps.

Yet, several times a year, into our man-made world of steel and smog come flocks of wild geese in their migrations. They fly overhead in perfect Vs and gather by the Detroit River, flocks of black-cheeked Canada geese with the occasional white interloper in their midst.

Their arrival makes me aware of a greater world outside of my own, a world of mystery and beauty where God feeds and directs all His creatures for His glory and pleasure. This is the world of sunsets and thunderstorms, of lightning and snow, of the deer that graze boldly along the highway through our city, and the insects that buzz in the summer trees.

Genesis 1 speaks of a week of creation, seven days in which man took up only the last: six days before that of earth and sky, water and stars, birds and beasts and beauty. It’s a world held together by incredibly precise and complex forces, a world scientific and mathematical, yet a world breathtakingly artistic. “What do I make of all this texture?” Annie Dillard wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

“What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.”Wild geese in the city are a reminder to leave my little world behind, to abandon for a while my careful mental and social and emotional constructs, and to plunge into the wider world God created and said was good — to go and look at it, listen to it, breathe its air, feel its imagination, and worship God in it.

Read the whole article on Boundless, here.

In case you haven’t seen this yet:

Inconvenient or not, we are stuck with the necessity of exegesis. We have a written word to read and attend to. It is God’s word, or so we believe, and we had better get it right. Exegesis is foundational to Christian spirituality. Foundations disappear from view as a building is constructed, but if the builders don’t build a solid foundation, their building doesn’t last long . . .

. . . Which is to say, the more “spiritual” we are, the more care we must give to exegesis. The more mature we become in the Christian faith, the more exegetically rigorous we must become. This is not a task from which we graduate. These words given to us in our Scriptures are constantly getting overlaid with personal preferences, cultural assumptions, sin distortions, and ignorant guesses that pollute the text. The pollutants are always in the air, gathering dust on our Bibles, corroding our use of the language, especially the language of faith. Exegesis is a dust cloth, a scrub brush, or even a Q-tip for keeping the words clean.

- Eugene Peterson, from Eat This Book

Today I had hot chocolate with a missionary friend, and I shared an area in which God is dealing with me: I’m scared of “big” things, especially if they have anything to do with serving God. It’s kind of a twisted hang-up, and I won’t go into all of its roots and branches here, but I thought I’d share the prayer that has recently been born out of it.

I also sometimes struggle with its opposite: the tendency to feel that the day-in, day-out, earthly necessities in which I spend so much of my time are not worth anything eternally. This is not true.

Anyway, the prayer. I’ve been praying, on a nearly daily basis:

God, help not to shy away from big things,

Nor to despise small things,

But to see and to serve you in all things.

Courage and faithfulness, that’s what I need.