Naive?

Naïve?

By John W. Vander Velden

 

Sometimes it seems to me that the world has found itself in the wash cycle, all tossed and tumbled about.  Maybe it has to do with my age.  The years have a way of doing that, as we wonder about changes, while dwelling on imperfect memories of times past.  I need to remind myself that not all of the “good ole days” were indeed good.  Yet all the same each of us look around and shake our heads and wonder.  It must be enough to know that God is in charge…and in the end things will work out.

Yet among societies change are those that stand firm in their convection that everything is some sort of random accident, adamant in their view that God does not exist…never has for that matter.  That view, to me, carries no logic.

You see I have been fortunate to have labored under sun and sky, tended livestock and tilled soil.  I have worked long hours alone…that is without other people…but have understood that I was never alone.  Raised in a home where God was real, as real as my sisters and brothers, my mother and father, my Aunt and Uncle, as real as my best friend that lived down the road.  It doesn’t mean I didn’t question God…what was happening…but never God’s existence.

Some might think that I was merely induced to accept His presence, but though I was taught, I have my own connections.  For I have seen God in the sunrise, the pinks that fill the eastern sky, and in the flaming reds painted all around at the sun’s evening departure.  I have seen God, when the barn’s first dim light was reflected in the eyes of a newborn calf, or the thin shoots of corn that crack the soil and reach up toward the sky.  I have seen God in the fresh brand new leaves of spring, and the golds and reds that dress the hardwood in autumn.  Truth, I look for Him everywhere and I am not disappointed.  I hear God in the rumbling thunder that rattles my ribs, but also in the whisper of the leaves that high above are sent to singing by the summer breeze.  I hear God in the robin’s evening song, and the scarlet clothed Cardinal welcoming of a new day. I hear Him in the beating heart of my beloved and heard Him in the first cry of our son that long night years ago.   I hear God when I listen…really listen…and once I heard his voice when in my anguish I yearned for answers.  I feel God in the wind that sometime pulls at my clothing or shakes the house late at night.  I feel God in the cold wet of a sudden rainstorm that drenches me through and through.  I feel God in the warmth of the sun on a clear winter’s day.  I felt God as I held my child those long hours I walked the floor in the darkness. I feel God all around me in the commonest and least common places, whenever I draw a breath and take the moment to notice.

You see unlike those that purposely close themselves to the possibility of God, I deliberately open myself.  The reality is more than words on a page.  The reality is more than hymns and sermons.  The reality is more than the present state of mind.  It is more than past’s limitations.  For God in more than we can understand.  More than imaginations can reach.  Human desire to be “top of the heap” does not mean we have the right to claim that place.  In a fast changing world where breakthroughs of technology abound, a time when so much of “our” world seems explainable and soon all questions will fall to the wayside, some see no place in that equation for a supreme being.  But scientific explanations cannot disregard the creator of science, and the rules of the universe are too complex to have occurred by chance.

Though the western hemisphere was unknown in medieval Europe, it did not come into being because of Columbus’s or any other explorer’s voyage.  We understand that.  Whether or not we acknowledge God, does not change the fact He exists.  Each of us has been given the freedom to choose, a gift of great responsibility.  A responsibility too few have taken the time to consider.  Easier to close our minds, one way or the other, and move along like cattle through our lives, than to take the time needed to really choose and understand the choosing.

Perhaps I am fortunate.  Perhaps this life style I have lived offered me opportunities few share.  Perhaps I just allow myself to be open…to see…to hear…to feel…to know.  Some might say I am naïve, I would disagree.

(811 Words)    11-4-2015