Defined - 06/12/2016

WARNING PREACHY

There is a feeling I occasionally get that I cannot explain.  It might be ‘majestic’, but I’m not royalty so I really could not know.  Maybe it’s ‘serenity’, that’s close I think, but this word is too inward focused and what my feeling does is recognize the reality of the external.  The feeling that I occasionally have comes from the grandeur of this world.

Last week I had the privilege of walking thought the Hartwick Pines state forest near Grayling, MI, and I felt this feeling.  I found myself walking among a forest of tall trees which canopied the land.  The earth’s sun shot through to the forest’s floor in small rays and the world’s noise was muffled to nothingness.  The only sounds were the rustling of the leaves above, various birds calls, the squeals of delight as my children explored this new (to them) world, and the constant question of my daughter, “Dad, are we going to see a bear?”

For a fleeting moment my mind compared what I would normally call the “real world” with the preserved paradise which I was presently walking though, and the Juxtaposion of the two worlds collided in my soul and informed me that I was wrong.  The world I was walking through was the ‘real’ world.  As the world was originally designed I was experiencing it, and it was glorious, it was serene, it was majestic, and it was a reminder that the reality of this life, which I commonly call the ‘real’, needs to be rethought.  I needed to examine the definitions that I have created, and redefine them with the definitions that have already been created for me.  Because in the tranquility of that forest I was reminded that sometimes I need not to define what I think is reality, but allow reality to define me.

Psalm 8

8 O Lord, our Lord,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
²     Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
    to still the enemy and the avenger.

³ When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
⁴ what is man that you are mindful of him,
    and the son of man that you care for him?

⁵ Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings^[b]
    and crowned him with glory and honor.
⁶ You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
    you have put all things under his feet,
⁷ all sheep and oxen,
    and also the beasts of the field,
⁸ the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
    whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

⁹ O Lord, our Lord,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!