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The Beauty of This World
The magnitude of God is so all encompassing, so everywhere, so surprising and real and reassuring. On my morning fast walks through the “banario” (beach) partially under very tall dark green pine trees dropping pine cones as pine needles cover the ground, there is no cleanup duty, no need to be removed like dead leaves in the fall. (Thank God there is no blower blasting all day. ) The needles make a soft blanket for walkers and I remember as a child, down near the front of the farm, there was a bevy of pine trees dropping pine needles, and I would push them together in piles and pretend I’d made a bed, table, kitchen, walls, things domestic for a doll or two so I could pretend to be a Mom. Only conifers drop cones and walking under them on a windy day, they hum a song of sorts and one hopes to get past their umbrella style into the open sky before one is knocked on the head with a falling cone. It amazes me the magnitude of trees God has given us.
 And the wild flowers like morning glories that wind their way over and under any shrub or weed y fence - I gasp with glee when I walk pass a royal purple Morning Glory vine that has puckered or opened up its bright dark flowers just as I walk by. Each flower blooms and dies in a single day. The vine, once with only a single flower, has hundreds of them now and I greet them with glee and thank God for the glory they are showing. It doesn’t take them long to creep and crawl over a good base, like a wired fence wrapped in some sort of wild greenery also run rampant, since it doesn’t belong to anyone in particular, only divides property in the sand. And I find out that morning glories have medicinal and hallucinogenic uses (psychedelic seeds) and the sulfur in them can vulcanize rubber.
See how simple but complicated it can be just to think about a single morning glory? that opens and shuts during its days in the sun? This is just one thing and God made it all work, and gave it beauty, and value, and no one has to cultivate it because it just IS, just as God wanted it. It’s hard to imagine all these things everywhere no matter what step one makes in any part of this earth. God’s home. God’s garden. And how often do we - who aren’t necessarily in garden clubs nor are expert horticulturalists - even see the awe in life, the beauty of a yellow aspen or pink dogwood tree, and wonder about its life?
Consider another gift from God: figs - my Mom loved to make fig jam. A large fig tree grew right outside the den window where she sat at her desk to do the farm checks. She could watch for those figs to grow and go out and could snitch one just ripe for a delicious delight. Now Mom’s fig tree might not have been as rich as those that originated in the Middle East, being in Memphis. But when I bought a haras (horse farm) in Uruguay, there was a small orchard of fig trees, about a dozen, of all sorts and types of figs, but the birds beat me to those sweet and delicious figs every season. Eating a fig right off the branch is tasting them at their best. It’s amazing to think that 11,400 years ago in a “prehistoric village” near Jericho figs were possibly the first ever cultivated food. Another God miracle. Remember Adam and Eve messed with figs in some way and used the tree’s giant leaves to cover themselves in Eden. Figs, obviously in Paradise then, were probably propagated as people stuck a stem in the ground and saw it sprout and produce more fruit. Once again, God uses something delicious and simple to get mankind’s attention and so it passes on down to us with much joy as well, once we figured it out.
And then there are the ants - I certainly don’t want them in our house, but they show up anyway crawling and working and building and moving like hot lines - and somedays I sit out by the pool on the concrete edge and begin to watch these busy busy insects that carry giant leaves of grass or part of a flower off to wherever they store or build things - one after the other moving and crawling over rough concrete, sometimes falling off a bump but continuing on and I am amazed. I try to take photos but they are so tiny it doesn’t take. These tiny creatures can even solve complex problems - like how to get a too big blade of grass into their tiny dot of an opening in a corner of the concrete border holding up a pool. But here is another miracle of life from God. What benefit has an ant? Its method of transport is exceptional. Its business makes the rest of us look like wimps. In the jungles of Africa ants are almost as big as rats and they tear up the land to make their homes. In South Africa they help harvest a plant used to make herbal tea. In areas like Thailand, one can order a red ant egg salad. Why did God create these ever-moving ants, be they tiny tiny busy bodies or giant ones like those in East Africa whose sting could kill a man? Ants have been on earth since the fossil age and up to today, there are now 22,000 species of them. God never rests, nor do His ant colonies managed by a queen ant!!
It’s all God’s land and people and animals and insects and flowers and trees and life that He provides for us and has since the beginning. I guess it has taken millions of years for mankind to understand most of it - as scientist and horticulturalist and just plain curious kids and adults get to know God’s amazing gifts to us. And we all are One. We all are of the kingdom. And there are good and bad versions of just about everything, which God allows to be, maybe so we appreciate the beauty of every single living and growing thing. It is all for us. His children. His love. So start looking at the little things and thank Him for allowing us to see the beauty in everything.
~ Rev
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audrey@audreytaylorgonzalez.com
www.audreytaylorgonzalez.com
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