My co-workers and I spent last Thursday night in a lodge at Kirk Park. It was a perfect afternoon and evening to be outside hiking in the woods, walking on the beach, and sitting around the fire with friends. This might be another way-overly-impressed-non-mitten-state-native commentary, but Lake Michigan still blows me away every time I see it. It’s magnificent!
Also, I am a sucker for sunsets. Especially the colorful ones. Most especially the pink, purple, orange, turquoise ones setting over large bodies of water. That evening, as Ben, Jared and I ran out of the woods looking for our next scavenger hunt clue, we were greeted by just that.
The scene prompted a flood of memories of past sunsets, people, and places: hiking around mountain lions with Seely in Fraser Valley; sitting on the overlook at Mole National Park with Stephanie and Deborah; watching the sun reflect off of Manhattan’s skyline from Ogden park with Amo, Kyle, Micah, Natasha, Dana; playing card games (until it got too dark) on the varanda with my folks at the sitio; identifying the various colors floating over the Long Island Sound with Jonathan and then Marjorie on East Rock; listening to my sister’s camp stories on the balcony at Fulton Street this summer; skipping rocks at Deception Pass with Sarah, Joey and James in September. I wanted to show this Lake Michigan sunset to all of them—heck—to everyone I know and love. How do you explain that feeling? My heart was full. That’s all I’ve got.
Then I imagined what God must experience in these places–after having thought them up and crafted them into being–how much he must DELIGHT in them. I really like Dallas Willard’s description of the similarly awe-inspiring scene he came across in South Africa:
I was totally unprepared for the experience. I had seen beaches, or so I thought. But when we came over the rise where the sea and the land opened up to us, I stood in stunned silence and then slowly walked toward the waves. Words cannot capture the view that confronted me. I saw space and light and texture and color and power… that seemed hardly of this earth.
Gradually there crept into my mind the realization that God sees this all the time. He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, in this and billions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through his being. It is perhaps strange to say, but suddenly I was extremely happy for God as though I had some sense of what an infinitely joyous consciousness he is and of what it might have meant for him to look at his creation and find it “very good.”
We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it and never tire of looking at their brilliant iridescence and marvelous forms and movements. But God has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys. We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right. This is what we must think of when we hear theologians and philosophers speak of him as a perfect being. This is his life. (From The Divine Conspiracy, Chapter 3)
“One great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right.” I want to know and love this God well.
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