Christ in Earth and Sky
Musings from a Month of Morning Walks
When I step outside the house at seven am these days, the air is cool and soft, unspooling the tightly wound heat of summer. The stonecrop bush in my garden expands its blossoms like lungs, a pale pink blush stealing over the creamy seedheads. And there is a low mist over the one green meadow at the edge of our neighborhood. This mist is unfurled with the rays of morning sun; it licks across the grass in a smooth silk ribbon of white.
In August, I am waking earlier than usual, finally accessing a store of energy that has been buried by the past few years of pregnancy and postpartum. Every morning I walk around the neighborhood. I watch the sky, watch the sun, watch the houses, the trees. In the evening, when I can, I repeat this path. From the beginning of this month to its end, I have taken note of the subtle changes in the air, in the color and texture of the plants and trees, in the variations in volume of the insect songs. There is nothing I must do with this information; the noticing is the pleasure, is the aim.
When I was a child, most of the year I felt like I lived outdoors. I knew the contours of day and night: how the air gusted in warm billows at four am on a July morning, how the sharp cold of winter burnished the stars’ lights as I stood outside on a December evening. Through the darkness of winter, I took to the woods and roads nearby our home, roaming until I could barely feel my fingers and toes. I listened to the creek water burble between fragile ice slivers edging frozen earth. In summer, I dripped miserably with sweat, working long hours in the orchards and gardens of the family farm. But in the evening, I often walked outside again of my own accord, rolling in the grass with my beloved kittens or climbing my favorite apple tree with the grape vines weaving themselves round in a thick curtain.
Many forces pushed and pulled at my soul in those formative years, forces I would come to reckon with later. But the force of Christ, in and through His creation, was the most powerful force of them all.1 As poet Brit McReynolds writes, He was “The splendid flame that led me through the night / And out of doors, a ghost travailing out unto the moors.”2
That flame’s force was irresistible, inescapable, but at the same time utterly gentle and kind. Romans 1:19-20 says that since the beginning of time, “People have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God has made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God” (NLT).
I knew a god of a system’s making: a god of fear and striving who demanded my silence and acquiescence with no regard for my emotions, thoughts, or the limitations of my human body. A god of control, not relationship. In the podcast Love CAll, hosted by an Anabaptist couple, the woman, Hannah, describes this type of system as a framework “where Jesus is not first, rather where we believe that we need a lot of manmade rules, or guardrails. . . to keep us holy. The system . . . is a system based on fear, fear of losing our salvation, of not being good enough, of not doing all the right things at all the right times to be good enough for God. The system is also very suspicious of beauty, especially feminine beauty.”
But what I learned from a preacher’s fear and the books lining my bedroom shelves,3 I began to unlearn in the gardens, the orchards, the woods. I soaked in the beauty, I swam in it. I felt the goodness of my female body as it worked, ran, walked, knelt, rested. I learned God’s power and strength in the thunder of a black sky, the force of hail drumming the earth. I felt His gentleness in the cool rain drops, in grasses slick with dew, in slow-spiraling snowflakes endlessly drifting to earth. I saw His loveliness and tender care in the unique petals of each flower I picked, each bird whose call I (poorly) imitated, each plant I touched. I took His omnipresence for granted, because the signs of Him were everywhere.
Not only did I learn God’s character through creation, but I received healing from it as well. Whatever the processes at work, the evidence is clear: Being surrounded by nature boosts our health and wellbeing. In a pilot study released in 2023, researchers state that “connectedness to nature is positively associated with a subjective perception of happiness, well-being, physical and mental health, and life satisfaction.” What researchers are “discovering” now in the digital, sterilized age we live in, I knew intuitively as a child (and I think all of us knew).
In my teen years, as I felt a nameless darkness growing in the corners of my life, I sought out the paths and creeks of the woods around my childhood home. In the early spring that my beloved grandpa died, I walked the road to his house every day to visit him as he weakened from cancer. What I remember from those walks is the orange and red brilliance of the sunset, and the overwhelming peace I felt even as I grieved. I knew my grandpa would be safe with the God he loved, whose beauty was so breathtaking.
I have talked to others, too, who have experienced healing through their time in nature. In a recent interview with a woman who has survived multiple forms of abuse, she shared that her childhood, although shadowed by parental dysfunction, was actually lovely. She played outdoors from sunup to sundown. “By far,” she says, “I remember the happy times.” So much play, so much nature, she believes, released trauma from her body that otherwise would have affected her more deeply.
Like her, I look back at the outdoor play of my childhood fondly, grateful that I had the freedom to roam, explore, and learn in a classroom wide enough and tall enough for all my questions, all of my confusion, all of the things I screamed and sobbed and prayed and wrenched out of my psyche when I was alone in the woods. I am grateful that I did not grow up like the 10-year-old child I met at the playground today, whose eyes remained glued to her smartphone screen even as she spun on the merry-go-round and climbed the steps to the slide. She was chatting with her AI boyfriend, I discovered.
What grace there is for us in the world, we need. As an adult (with a smartphone), I can forget the simplicity of walking outside, of sitting in the grass, of watching a bird (as I write this on our back patio, a pair of goldfinches are frolicking around the lone sunflower blossom in my garden!). I can wave my children outdoors, and forget that I, too, might benefit from being outdoors.
A few years ago, during a time when I felt extremely anxious and dysregulated, my counselor told me to take a 10-minute walk on my own. To the extent that I could, she asked me to not spin my thoughts around the problems I was trying to solve. Instead, she told me to listen, look, smell, touch, and to name all the things I noticed. It was a powerful, yet incredibly simple exercise. Although my anxieties didn’t disappear, I was comforted by the sensory input, reminded of the steady presence of Him “who existed before anything else” and who “holds all creation together” (Col. 1:17).
His Spirit is here, even in a creation which groans for Christ’s coming in the flesh, for His ultimate healing touch that cures all our diseases and takes all the grief from our broken hearts.
And in and through His written word, but that’s another story for another time.
Brit McReynolds, “The Ghostly Flame.”
Books such as Secret Keepers by Dannah Gresh, So Much More by Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, Dear Princess by Mary Landis . . . and many more.
Such beautiful writing and poignant thoughts. ❤️And that 10 year old 😭😭😭 Lord, have mercy.