Seth Lewis's Blog, page 2

Small (a poem)

A sunbeam
A bird
A smile
A word
A song
So revealing
So filled up
With feeling
A wrinkle
A fear
A sweat bead
A tear
A dance in the kitchen
A laugh in the hall—
A lifetime so big
Made of moments
So small

Of Birds, Baguettes, And Being A Creature

On a lakeshore in the French Alps, the old city of Annecy rises to meet the castle that crowns the hill. At the water’s edge, shops and restaurants trade in the same buildings that were used by medieval merchants. Our children were small when our family visited, but the memories are still clear in my mind. I remember the woman beside the water with a baguette, feeding the birds. I remember how fascinated the children were at how she could get the birds to come and eat bread right out of her hands. Then, when she noticed them noticing her, she generously gave the rest of her baguette to our family so that we could try it, too. Sure enough, a few bits of baguette was all it took to attract flocks of sparrows who flew around our heads, landed on our fingers and ate right out of our outstretched hands. Then again, who wouldn’t accept an invitation to share in a proper French baguette? As they came, we wondered at their tiny bodies, and we laughed at the feeling of their feet on our fingers. I suppose all animals will be this friendly and unafraid in the new creation. That will be glorious.

The birds entrusted themselves to us because they believed we would help them, and we did. They were marvellous creatures, and I still marvel at the memory of that moment. As I think of it, I’m also reminded that I, too, am a creature. I may not fly, but I have the gift of life, I eat, and I prefer French baguettes, just like the birds. My life is no more self-sufficient than theirs. I, too, am dependent on realities outside of myself to sustain the life I have. And—best of all—I, too, have Someone much bigger, much greater, whose hands I can come to, rest in, and receive my daily needs from.

Being a creature is risky. We have to admit that we are vulnerable. Our lives are fragile. From our first breath to our last, everything we have is received. What good would it do to pretend otherwise? What benefit could we gain from trying so hard to prove our total independence? I’d rather be like the birds in Annecy, freely coming to rest and receive from the hands that provide for them. Yes, I am a creature, with all the limits inherent. That’s ok. It’s good to be a creature when you have a Creator like ours.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? … So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

– Matthew 6:25-27, 31-33

Appreciation Grows With Knowledge

The car windows were open, and Carlos Santana was making his guitar sing out of our stereo in ways that few can imitate. With the wind in her hair, my wife commented from the passenger seat that she reckoned people who play guitar probably appreciate his solos more than she could. She’s an experienced musician herself, but her instrument is piano. I play guitar—but I wouldn’t claim such a thing in front of Carlos. Still, even my amateur knowledge makes me see the truth in what my wife said. I’ve tried to learn my scales and unlock the hidden order of the fretboard and train my fingers to move freely along it—and I have not succeeded. When I hear someone whose mastery of the instrument is as complete as Santana’s, I think my own attempts—as small as they are—really do make me appreciate his abilities in a different way. My limited experience with the instrument gives me the beginnings of a context for the kind of work he must have put in day after day and year after year to develop his seemingly effortless (yet in reality hard won) talent. I’d imagine if I was more accomplished at guitar myself, I would appreciate the skill of masters like Santana even more. As my knowledge of music grows, my appreciation grows along with it.

I think the same dynamic is true for pretty much everything—including this incredible world that we live in. Sometimes people seem to have an idea that learning the nitty gritty scientific facts about nature will rob the world of its mystery and wonder, but why should it? The hidden facts I’ve learned about our world are just as fascinating, if not more so, than my surface-level observations. Is a leaf less wonderful when you discover that it photosynthesises sunlight into energy and growth all day long? Is a hummingbird less awe-inspiring when you learn about its flight mechanics? I don’t think so. Is the forest less enchanting when you learn that the trees communicate with each other through the underground fungal network? Doesn’t that make it more enchanting? Does it rob the honey bee of mystery to know that it is equipped to see ultraviolet colours you’ll never see yourself? Doesn’t that make it more mysterious?

I know sometimes science can be taught as a boring, Latin-riddled memory game, but if you look beyond the unpronounceable titles you’ll see that every cell of every flower and every funny-looking microscopic organism is full to bursting with incredible details that will only make your appreciation of God’s wisdom and creativity grow as you grow in your understanding of them. This is true for mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, medicine, music, and every other realm of knowledge with every detail we’ve ever discovered and so many more we’ve yet to uncover. God is a much more magnificent master than Santana, and the more you learn about his work, the more you’ll be able to appreciate his skill. Science is not the enemy of worship or of faith, as many have maintained. It is a close companion—a friendly teacher who whispers wonders in our ears and leads us to greater delight, greater awe, greater appreciation and worship for our masterful Creator.

Wildflowers Anonymous (a poem)

Hello my name is
Wildflower
Here today and
Gone tomorrow
Bursting glory
In my hour
Then I fade away

With me are ten thousand
Others—each one with
The same bright colours
How will I stand out from these
If I am just the same?

I don’t mind
It’s not my job
My colours are
A gift from God
And if I bloom
For just one day
And if a million
Are the same
And if nobody
Learns my name
I’ll still bloom here—
I still will bring
My little piece of glory
Sing
My song into the story
For my Maker
For my King

A Personal Update

I’ve been living on this planet long enough to get used to a lot of things (probably too used to too many things), but I’m also starting to realise that there is—and always will be—more room for first-time experiences. The world is full of possibilities, and life is full of change. Things won’t stay the same for long even if I want them to, so I figure I might as well embrace the constant adjustments and do my best to keep learning as I go. That’s certainly the way it is with family life—our children keep changing and growing, with new experiences all around. Our oldest son just got his provisional driving license, our middle son got a drum kit, and our daughter—the youngest—is about to graduate from primary school. I’m about to be the father of three children in secondary school, a new experience for sure. It feels strange, but that’s ok. Life is like that. Bring it on. Another new experience for me is leading our local church, which just launched in February, so everything we do is new. It’s been a full few months, and I’ve loved it. I thank God every day for the wonderful people we get to share life with in our little church. If you’re not part of a local church, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Find one and get as involved as you can!

On the writing front, next week I’ll be heading to the UK for another new experience—I’ll be participating in the St. Andrew’s Literary Festival in Great Missenden. I’ll be sharing about “The Language of Rivers and Stars” at two sessions, one on Friday, the 13th, and another on Saturday, the 14th. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there!

Finally, I have a big announcement that I’d like you to know about: I recently signed a contract with The Good Book Company for my third book. The working title is: “The Harvest is in the Seed: Sowing and Reaping the Blessings of Wisdom.” It will explore the theme of sowing and reaping through scripture and the world God gave us, drawing out how we can plant and cultivate good harvests in our lives. While the culture we live in is often fixated on immediate pleasures and instant results, I’m convinced from scripture that many of God’s greatest blessings and most powerful transformations grow slowly over time as we plant the seeds of faith and obedience day after day in the ordinary realities of our lives. I’m excited about the book, but I’m only just getting started and the timeline for this one is long—perhaps it’s fitting that this particular book should grow slowly. It’s also necessary with the other realities of life right now. Still, I’m delighted to be working towards another book and I’ll be excited to share it with you in due course. I would greatly appreciate your prayers for the process. Thank you!

Three Castle Head

On a sunny day in the Spring, we pulled the car into a gravel parking area at the end of a remote peninsula in Ireland. The sea shimmered in the light beyond the deep green fields lined and dotted with grey rock walls and white sheep. We opened the gate and crossed a field, and then another, and another, carefully following the faint paths worn by the feet of those who had come here before us. Sometimes we had to make a choice—it seems not all of our predecessors had gone the same way. Or did hooves make one trail, and feet another? Eventually the grassy fields gave way to rocky hills, and we scrambled up one side and down the other where the grass and mud and boulders and the sound of the sea all blend together into a kind of otherworldly magic and I had to remind myself that I wasn’t looking at an illustration of the Wild Lands of Narnia—I was in the real, tangible, wild of the actual world.

As we came down the slope of the last rocky hill I had to remind myself again, because there in front of me was one of the most perfectly ruined castles I’ve ever seen—no fantasy illustrator could have drawn it better. Three towers stood, each unique and dishevelled in its own particular ways, with a half-broken wall connecting them across a narrow pass of land between a sea cliff on one side and a lake on the other. As we went through the ancient arches and crumbling doorways, we imagined what life was like in this remote headland more than 800 years ago when Donagh “the Migrator,” chieftain of the O’Mahony clan, established his last line of defence against the encroaching Normans. It worked. The O’Mahony’s remained securely at Three Castle Head for 400 years. But they’re gone now, and the land around their bastion is only inhabited by sheep. The threatening Normans are gone, as well, so the old ruined towers have for the last several centuries been proudly defending a remote headland that no one is interested in attacking.

We were only passing visitors, taking it in, walking away. We came to feel the weight of the long centuries wash over us like a wave where the unspoken stories of innumerable lives still cling to the walls with the moss. We could hear the echo of their histories, but no matter how hard we strained, we couldn’t make out the individual words.

All I know for sure is that I am a passing visitor in a long story, a story with so many characters and so many adventures beyond my reach and knowledge, more forgotten than remembered, still hanging heavy in the air. All I know is that the fairy tales are more true than I thought—I walked through one of the illustrations—and I’m a character here, as well, and my story is part of it all. Many stories, many lives have passed this way before me, have impacted me and shaped my world in ways that I don’t understand. Many more will come after me. The time of Donagh and the Normans is past, and my time has come, and my time will also, just as surely as theirs, pass. At Three Castle Head, I felt the weight of the past, even if I could not understand it. I can hardly understand my own story, much less how it fits with theirs and everyone else’s, and everyone yet to come. I feel the rush of history surging around me and I thank God that the Author of all of this knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows exactly where history—his story—is going. He knows how to get there. He knows every one of his characters. He cares. He sees. He remembers.

I Don’t Know Where The Streams Are

One warm Monday evening, I found myself with half an hour to fill as I waited for one of my children to have a music lesson. Across the street was a new greenway, quietly inviting me to spend the time strolling instead of scrolling. The path passed along roads I’d travelled many times in the car, so I didn’t expect to see anything new, just to stretch my legs. I was wrong.

Things look different when you’re walking. You have time to notice the individual wildflowers, and the meadow behind the wall with the horses in it that you just couldn’t see from the driver’s seat of the car. The discovery that surprised me most, though, was the stream running right beside the road. Through the crowded trees and bushes it babbles away constantly as it splashes its way over rocks and under roots and how did I travel this road so many times and never even know this was here?

I never saw it. I never heard it, laughing. My convenient car lifted me off the ground and protected me from the elements, gave me incredible freedom of movement—and robbed me of experiencing the natural wonders that were literally right beside me. Fresh water is not just a natural beauty. It’s essential to life. Not so long ago, everyone needed to know exactly where the local fresh water sources were. And we still depend, just as much as anyone ever did, on fresh water. The difference for me is only that someone laid pipes and built machines that can take water from its sources and send it directly to the taps in my house. I don’t need to know where the streams are anymore, the streams now come to me. I don’t need to think about them. I can safely take fresh water for granted.

Or can I?

It may be safe for my body to take the water I depend on for granted, but forgetting my dependence is never safe for my soul. If I let it, my modern plumbing could leak a lie into my mind—it could subtly assure me that I can get everything I need by human means, and human power. And while humans have been very clever about cleaning and re-routing my drinking water—and I’m very thankful for their efforts—that doesn’t change the fact that the one who invented water in the first place is God. However it gets to me, the water in the tap is his. Ultimately, my life is not sustained by human ingenuity. It is sustained by the creative power and provision of the God who made the water cycle, who fills the air I fill my lungs with, who causes my food to grow through the seasons. I don’t need to know which streams I drink from anymore, but I do need to remember who sustains my life. It is not me. It is not my plumber. It is my Lord.

“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you;
or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of all mankind.”

– Job 12:7-10

Afternoon (a poem)

At first all I feel is
The stillness and peace—
The silence of grass and
The patience of trees

Then slowly my senses
Begin to attune
To the business of nature
This warm afternoon

The birds chatter on
With their intricate songs
And there must be a meaning
To what I am hearing
While bees move with vigour
From flower to flower
A butterfly, also—
Though his schedule’s lighter
And now I see flies
And some midges float by
And an ant—and the action
Is filling my eyes!
And though it is quiet
Compared to my screens
And though it is peaceful
There’s work for the trees
As they silently grow
And the ivy and gorse
And the grass-eating horse
For the peace of this earth
Isn’t lazy or languid
It’s busy and blessed
And yet somehow,
At rest

What The Mysteries Of The Universe Teach Us About God

Every so often I run across a news article about new discoveries that could reshape our understanding of the universe, or how some scientists are proposing new ways of thinking about the questions that continue to confound our best efforts of explanation. As our knowledge grows and our scientific theories continually shift in response, it’s obvious that our experts are still out of their depth in the mysteries of creation. It often seems that the more we find out about the universe, the more questions we end up having about it. For all we’ve discovered, we still don’t know some of the fundamental basics about how it works. Yes, we have theories like dark matter to explain anomalies we don’t understand, but we’ve never observed dark matter and we may very well be wrong about it. We theorise about black holes, and postulate about the meaning of ripples in the space-time continuum. At the heart of the physical universe that supports our lives, there are mysteries that still boggle our minds. We know this, and accept it, even as we work to understand more. But while people have learned to live with this tension in our knowledge of the fundamental realities of the universe, they often reject the exact same dynamic when it comes to the One who created the universe. If you think about this, it doesn’t make sense.

Why should we expect the Creator to be easier to understand than his creation? Wouldn’t we rather expect him to be even deeper, even broader and more expansive than anything he made? Wouldn’t he, of all things, be the most mind-blowing reality of all?

This is one reason I find Christianity so compelling. It is not only because of my personal experience of God working in my life (which is undeniable), the historical record, prophecy, and the like. It is also because Christianity presents God to us as a reality that expands far beyond our understanding. Take the doctrine of the Trinity, for example: who can understand it fully? How can God exist in three persons, with one nature, at the same time? Yes—and how can light be both a particle and a wave? And how can quantum particles exist in multiple states at the same time as long as they aren’t being observed? Why has a unified theory that reconciles the inconsistencies of observable science been so elusive to our best and brightest experts?

Some people use the doctrine of the Trinity to mock Christians with the silliness of believing in mind-bending conundrums. I see it the other way around. Mind-bending conundrums already surround us, and I reckon that a God who can dream up quantum mechanics should logically be more complex than the physics he created. We ought to expect a struggle when we try to get our little minds around the fullness of who God is—just like we struggle to understand the universe he invented. In both cases, the struggle is definitely worth the effort.

If you’d like to think more about how creation speaks to us about our Creator, check out my new book: The Language of Rivers and Stars

The Language of Rivers and Stars

While the children were off school this Easter our family took a trip to explore Mizen Head, the southernmost tip of Ireland. It’s a remote peninsula where the rocky, wild terrain is dotted with cottages of white or pale yellow and the land is a patchwork of squares and rectangles divided by low stone walls. Clusters of sheep and cows surround tiny villages with steeples in the middle and strings of houses and pubs and shops that might be out of eggs if you get there too late. At the southern point where the land runs out there’s an old signal station that’s become a tourist attraction, reached by a footbridge that stretches between impassable sea cliffs. When we walked across and looked down we saw three seals far below us, relaxing in a rocky inlet surrounded by towering, jagged rocks while the seagulls soared above our heads. In the far distance, we could just make out the shape of Fastnet Rock, a tiny island of stone where people managed—somehow—to build a lighthouse to warn those at sea of the ship-shattering dangers around them. At our feet the just-blooming sea-pinks waved in the breeze and I wondered again how these flowers manage—and even seem to prefer—to grow in places where there is so little soil and so much violent wind from the ever-turbulent ocean.

In a place like Mizen Head, the voice of nature is loud. I don’t just mean the steady crash of waves against the cliffs, the crying seagulls, or the blustery wind—I mean the mysterious power of nature to bypass all of our distractions and defences and speak directly to our souls without needing any words of prose or poetry and without needing any permission. As David wrote in Psalm 19,

“The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.”

At Mizen Head I felt small against the towering cliffs. I was intimidated at times by the invisible, unstoppable force of the wind. In the sea-pinks I saw living, fragile artistry thriving and blooming in challenging conditions, and above them I saw the seagulls nesting in places no wingless creature could reach. I saw the seals’ sleek bodies playfully enjoying the calmer waters of the inlet, and the vast expanse of the ocean stretching out to the horizon and beyond. My eyes were made to see these things, my ears to hear these crashes and cries, my senses to feel them—and my heart was made to respond. David finishes his Psalm with a prayer—not a prayer of thanks for God’s powerful voice in nature (although that would be appropriate), but a prayer about his own words of response:

“May these words of my mouth and this
meditation of my heart
be pleasing in your sight,
Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”

This voice that speaks to me in wind and water, in grass and flower and rock is the voice of God himself, the Creator of all things. He made me able to hear his voice, and he also gave me a voice of my own. How will I use it? What cry can I add to the sea and the seagulls? I can, and I must, cry out in praise.

My new book, The Language of Rivers and Stars, officially releases tomorrow, the 1st of May. In it, I explore how we can better understand and respond to God’s voice in nature with the help of God’s voice in scripture. You can order it now from your favourite bookstore.