I love nature; the interaction of creatures and plants and the environment creates such an intertwined web of the cycles of life and death, both of which are beautiful to me because there would be no life without death to nourish it. I adore frogs and ferns and sweetgrass; I treasure the gentle, fluffy living career of moss in shady areas, and the daisies and clover and wood-sorrel that pops up in yards. When it rains overnight, I look for pleated inkcap mushrooms in the morning, and as they dry throughout the day I press them like flowers.
A black swallowtail in my garden
Paying attention to individual organisms is important, but in order to understand our world, we must study the interactions between organisms with one another and the environment. No single living things can survive on its own. This is the concept of ecology. Plants and some microorganisms use the process of photosynthesis to harness the energy of the sun to make their own food, producing oxygen as a byproduct. Animals and fungi rely on plants as a base source of nutrients, because they can't make their own food, and animals rely on the oxygen that plants make in order to live. In the same way, plants can't make food without the carbon dioxide that animals produce when they breathe in oxygen and process it. All life in earth depends on the energy of the sun. And all of the organisms on earth are interconnected. All life is independent on each other, because that's how we were made to be.
Living in crowded, grey, industrialized cities is sometimes our only option; still though, it leaves us distanced from God's creation, entranced in the web of society and immediate answers. But we see clearly all around in nature, that growth is never in a day, healing is never in a weekend, and strength comes with many years of health. If the mightiest eastern hemlocks or sycamores grew so big in a week, they would be shooting up out of the ground, tearing apart burrows and roots and the fragile ecosystem of the soil. It wouldn't be healthy or safe for anything involved, especially the tree. Instead, God made them to slowly and steadily creep into the skies over decades, gently easing their roots through the web of life in the ground, nuzzling up between other tree branches and maybe even growing intertwined with an entire other tree, roots and all.
This illustration of a tree points out the destructive flaws of industrialized society today: immediate results cannot be obtained without disrupting everything we rely on for food and life, and endlessly taking from nature, carelessly, without giving back to it what other organisms depend on us for, hurts us just as much as them. The Lord made us to live in harmony with His creation just as much as to rule over it; in Eden, the first humans were created to give each creature a name, and not to hurt them bit to watch over and provide for them all, just as God provided for them.
"The false sense of security provided by supermarkets and convenience stores sometimes keeps me from fully appreciating that I am sustained by Jesus’ powerful Word, and that in Him all things hold together. Whether or not we realize it, we are just as dependent upon God’s control of the natural world as people in Third World countries who may starve if a flood destroys their one field of crops.
"Caroline Falconi, my sister-in-law, works as a program evaluator for organizations such as World Vision. She travels the world to discuss with the poor the challenges and problems they face. Several years ago as we were talking about the people she has met, I asked her about the Christians she’s met among the poor. Caroline told me she had noticed that the people who seemed to have the most intimate relationships with the Lord were those most intimate with the earth. “Each seed represents a possible future, so there’s this look on their faces when they plant and look at the rain.” She paused with a smile, seeming to recall that “look,” then continued. “They’re hopeful. They are utterly dependent upon the Lord for survival. If it doesn’t rain, their crops die. In many ways they have a much deeper faith than most North American Christians I’ve known.”
"As one of those “North American Christians,” this stuck with me. Caroline wasn’t challenging me or trying to make me feel bad. She was responding to my questions honestly." ( https://byfaithonline.com/worshiping-god-by-admiring-his-creation/ )
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