A Drive into the Country Yesterday

Yesterday we drove through miles of rich farm land south of our town. We saw the wealth of agriculture, including newly sprouted corn only several inches tall, with some huge farm business buildings, equipped to handle bountiful crops and much livestock. Occasionally there were also huge lawns of freshly mowed spring grass, leading up to mansions, some seemingly built for tribes of families.

We were going to a viewing of a young girl who had died, apparently of an illness and in a road accident, a near-cousin to my wife. We sat there for likely close to an hour as some hundreds of people filed through to console the parents and relatives and to view one more time. I sat there among those hundreds, most of the men dressed in appropriate white shirts according to their religious costume. I felt a bit out of place, dressed a bit more casually. I was reminded how I was among another formally dressed group some time ago, where I was among the very few dressed in a white shirt. How different the costumes of these who practiced similar distinctiveness, however contrasting on that point.

But what really caught my attention was that no doubt, the great majority of these were dedicated to farming and probably not to share the Gospel with all their wealth and strength and Spiritual commitment. I felt awed and burdened that these all deeply religious and spiritual people had such a commitment of faith and abundance of gifts of farming and had build up for themselves a good and pious living. I wonder if their church has any programs to help the world in its great needs of the Gospel and basic needs of survival. Perhaps some participated in relief sales, where they may still get some reward as they give to help the needy.

I have no right to judge, but how does this look to God? I don't know. It is not my business. But I ached to see all this spiritual and material wealth stacked high while many in the world are starving for the Gospel, if not for daily existence. We prayed about this this morning, but I hardly have faith that things will ever change with these people. I hope my vision of yesterday was faulty, that they are doing so much more than it appeared. Again, I am not the Judge. But I also have to consider my priorities. Even as we drove home from there, a message was texted to us from a family in Belize who is often needy and asking for help. I just can't quite get over the experience of yesterday as we went to that viewing, and the traveling through those mounds of wealth, and the apparent treasure of the Gospel stacked there for the few, who have a long heritage of wanting to be faithful to God, and untouched by the world.

                                                       “We Are Special”

I can recall various times of things my father did when I was young that has made me feel that I was special to him. Like riding me on his foot with his legs crossed and saying a nursery rime to that rhythm. Or the way he cooed over tiny babies, and no doubt over me when I was an infant. He took us children onto his lap and sang to us Christmas songs in the season. I have often thought of how I must have been special to him. Yet I doubt much that I was more special to him than the other 9 children. He just treated me  so, to make me feel his special love for his children.

I am thinking that is the way God has imprinted all human beings to feel there is a God somewhere that is trying to relate to them. Practically every tribe on earth has a Great Spirit of some kind, even where there is not much worship in the culture. The Quaker group has a term for this pervasiveness, “that of God in every man”. God has made the human race feel special, as if this set of created beings is unique in all of creation. Way back in the Genesis story of creation, Man was the crowning work of God and given jurisdiction over the earth and all living things with the right to subdue the earth. Yet is this a real, reality, or just the sense we have, feeling we are treated by God as if we are special?

I have to wonder about this when I look at various species of nature. Birds sing and communicate with each other. They sing like they may be having their morning devotions, as I have heard them many times in the morning. When the wolves or coyotes howl at night, who is the audience? Whales also sing. I saw recently where some musicians learned the music of whales, or was it dolphins, and when an orchestra played this music, they had an audience of the sea creatures coming up and leaping, as for applause, (or worship? to the music they heard. Was it their music? I have to wonder: could it be possible that other animals and birds, perhaps even insects who are known to communicate with each other, might they also have a theology of being special just like we do?

How about plants? We hardly call them inanimate. Yet do they have any life of communication and feeling? Why are they all communicating to who ever, the motivation to be as beautiful and productive as possible, as if it is their calling? Some experiment which I cannot recall precisely, gave impressions of feelings when plants are treated specifically. When a person walked into a green house with a machete bent on destroying the plants they “shriveled in fear” if I recall rightly, but with a benevolent gardener passing they had no response. Could plants actually be smarter than we think? After all, we know we are the Special Ones.

Here I want to venture even further out into speculation. Are molecules really just little machines with atoms dancing round the nucleus with nearly the speed of light, just as they have to? I don't know. But they also are doing a lot more than they would have to just to be stuff to make a universe with things more obviously special.

Thus brings us back to where we started. God has a way of making a special creation where everyone feels they are special. We tend to feel we are the select special ones, where there are many aspects of God's creation that could as well feel special. We haven't even mentioned the sun, the stars, the galaxies and the super nova, what ever that is, all of whom could claim to specialness, each in their own way and sphere. God certainly is a wondrous God to give each aspect of his creation, a sense of being his own SPECIAL creation, perhaps each feeling they are created in the image of God, just as or in some way, like we do. Each having a theology of specialness.

I don't think this imagination is absurd. With God nothing is impossible. I am convinced God is far more than any person has ever let their mind run wild on. I am just pushing out the limits of my thinking. I invite anyone to do the same. If you feel you are special.