Let's Discuss: Reading the Big Book
Welcome to The Wildroot Parables weekly discussions! This is where we can come together as a community and have real talk with one another: open, honest, gracious, and curious.
This is YOUR space to discuss with each other, not just engage with me! Because of this, SAFE SHARING is my highest priority. If you are not engaging safely and with grace with others, you will have to leave. Period.
Thank you for entering this space with care!
The apostle Paul wrote: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)
If that means we can “find God” in the Big Book of nature, then what does nature tell YOU about Who God Is and what He is like?
What a beautiful question!! The Big Book tells me God is creative (happy face spiders in Hawaii! Colorful birds! Mountains & plains! Autumn! On & on & on!), God is kind (the way animals care for their young, some mate for life, the softness of moss & beauty of flowers), and that God provides (nature’s medicine cabinet! Matthew 6:25-34 talks about how nature illustrates His provision). The vastness of the universe tells me God is infinitely bigger than I can comprehend. Creation sings His glory in innumerable ways.
I find that Nature shows me the mysterious paradoxes of God...the grandeur of a forest is held alongside the tiny mosses and lichen that call a forest 'home,' and that always reminds me of the paradox that even God, in his glory, still numbers the hairs on my head and knows when a sparrow falls. God is grand and exceedingly mysterious, but also whimsical and personal. Nature also reveals the apparent paradox in God's universal laws - that there is suffering alongside joy, just as in Nature, there is growth amidst decay. God's work through Nature beckons me to hold these paradoxes together, openly in the palm of my hand, instead of wrestling over them or struggling to make sense of them, as if there can only be one or the other way of being.