The God-life that gives you birth.

Larger than ever-spreading sky, Stronger than every law of earth, Calmer than a mirror-like sea, Is the God-Life that gives you birth. (Living Calm ©2016)

This verse was written a couple of years before my husband and I visited the fiords in southern Chile. One Chilean fiord was so beautiful, reflections everywhere, with barely a ripple! I immediately recognized it as the “mirror-like sea” of this poem.

But nature’s “mirror-like sea” doesn’t last. Even the next day there was windy turmoil as we took a boat tour up into the fiords and glaciers. But that’s okay. Nature wasn’t intended to be unchanging. Rather, it is to be a symbol, only a hint of who our Creator is. As CS Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “Everything God has made has some likeness to Himself.” But the “greatness of space” is not the same as the greatness of God. The “hugeness” of the universe is only a “translation,” Lewis wrote, “a sort of symbol” (“Making and Begetting”).

Without the seeming limitlessness of the night sky and the rhythms of the sun and the moon, for example, what would draw our gaze upward and stretch our soul? The very immensity of space is what gives us some understanding of the all-encompassing presence of a transcendent Creator.

Similarly, God’s being, His Spirit of life, is greater than the teeming natural life we see here on earth. The Father-Creator, whom Jesus also calls “our Father,” sent his Son to show us His vibrancy of life. Christ didn’t need the resurrection to understand what this God-Life includes. But we human beings desperately did need it. As Jesus’ promised, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (KJ John 10:10). Oh, how I love the possibilities and the calm of our God-inspired, continuing life!