Look around. It's beautiful.

Something To Think About, BEAUTY:

I am privileged to live in an incredibly beautiful place on God's globe.  It is sad that so often I fail to look.  I took a bike ride in the country, yesterday, then my wife and I went to a local lake and sat on the mirror like surface and enjoyed supper.  The mountains around the water turned from green to black silhouettes, rimmed with the last golden light of day.  A flock of birds moving in amazing unison stretched across the sky like a huge ribbon in the wind, twisting, turning, vanishing, returning.  Then today I took a one hundred twenty mile round trip through the mountains and along a couple of streams.  The morning fog turned to blue skies, but patches of mist still clung to some of the ridges. I don't always look at the beauty around me.  Sometimes I'm in a hurry so I rush by.  Other times I'm looking down so I won't stumble, or my focus is inward on my problems.  In the same way that the"worries of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things" choke out the good seed of the Word of God before it bears fruit (Mark 4:19), carrying daily worries around--especially beyond their intended one day shelf-life--blinds one to the beauty of God's world. I'm not your doctor, I'm just a guy who tries to write something worth thinking about from time to time, but here is my prescription:      Take a minute, or two, or three, or a whole hour, look around, and thank God for the beauty of the world. In spite of the blight of sin, it is still wonderful to behold. Then, with the wonder still in your heart, say, "Thank You, Lord." It's STTA.

Shaky Conclusions:

Something To Think About America's Day Began Pretty Shaky, This Morning. 9/17

Where America's Day Begins--that's one of the descriptions of Guam.  A pretty small--though it is the largest in Micronesia--island in the Pacific.  As I write in the morning, here in Virginia, it is already the middle of the night, tonight, there on the other side of the world. If America's day begins in Guam, then this day started badly. About 3:00 this morning EDT, a 7.1 earthquake, centered just twenty-five miles off Guam shook the island with enough force to get everyone's attention.  Surely such a phenomena, especially where our day begins, has to be a warning--maybe even a punishment.  Perhaps God is rattling our new-day to shake us from our complacency.  Maybe God is sending a signal to Washington.  "You think you are secure from attack?  You think you can ignore the cries of the refuges fleeing for their lives?  I can shake you from your position of faux-security as easily as I can shake your island on the far horizon." No doubt an imam somewhere is drawing entirely different applications from the shake-up in the place where America's dawn first creeps over the horizon. If you didn't read yesterday's STTA, I hope you will.  This one is a follow-up. As the old song goes, "He's got the whole world in His hands."  Yet, as my tongue-in-cheek interpretation of natural phenomena indicates, unless God gives us a clear indication of what something means, we are clueless.  And--I know I'll raise some antagonism here--folk who claim to heard from God about the why behind the what, haven't.  Hurricane Katrina wasn't a judgment on the Gay community, Sandy didn't strike New York in judgment against Mayor Bloomberg, and the fact that one person's house is bigger than another is no particular indication of God's blessing. When you ask me "Why?" concerning the What.  My answer is, "I don't know." Is there nothing we can learn from natural disasters and wondrous natural beauty? No, there is a great deal we can learn.  Psalm 19 tell us that the sky is the display of God's handiwork.  Job saw his smallness as he viewed the greatness of God's creation.  Basic characteristics inherent in creation can lead a thinking person to conclusions about the creator. But when we claim to know specific meaning behind specific happenings in the natural world we are, to quote Job, "declar[ing] that which I [don't]  understand, things too wonderful for me, which I [don't] know.”  (Job 42:3)   It's Something to Think About.