New Lenses

Looking at life through new lenses is affecting more areas of life than I anticipated.  In the past, I felt a little guilty when people would comment about the glory of God reflected in nature.  I would wonder what was wrong with me that I did not feel this connection.  After all, didn’t God say His invisible attributes were shown forth through the things He has made? 

It wasn’t as if I couldn’t appreciate a beautiful sunset or enjoy the foliage or love being at the beach.  It was that others seemed to have more of a meaningful relationship with God through what they were experiencing.  I never felt that way.  And of course, when I measured myself against their interpretation, I always wondered why I didn’t “get it”.  I contented myself by joking that I was not a “nature” girl.  Most of the time, I don’t even like to be outside all that much.  For a while, I refused to buy boots, even though I live in New England, so I would have an excuse to stay inside in winter.  Going for a ride in the car, finding a nice place to park and rolling down the window felt like being outside to me. 

However, I like to take God at His word, so over the years, I have asked to have a new appreciation of nature since it is His handiwork.  It hasn’t been a primary prayer or anything.  It was just an asking off and on; here and there.  Once in a while, something caught my eye in a new way.  I noticed a detail I would have passed over before.  I decided that when that happened, I would take another look.  I would take a little bit more time and stay in the moment.   I wanted to capture some of the beauty, so I began to take pictures of sunsets or cloud formations, but the pictures never seemed to do justice to what I saw with my eyes.  There were no bells, no whistles…just a new place of consciousness opening up. 

Then, I had the idea of challenging myself to describe what I saw in creative language.  I like to write, but creative writing isn’t what I do most of the time.   So, I took on my own challenge and using personification and new ways of describing what I saw, I began to appreciate in a greater way, the wonders opening up to me.  If truth be told, I once spent half an hour on a description I wanted to post on Facebook, getting just the right wording for the feeling I had.  But that’s time well spent when I am training myself in a discipline I am called to.

This is a relatively new place for me; this appreciation of nature.  It’s like a whole new room has opened up.  It’s really like I received new lenses for seeing things that were hidden or veiled before.  I am so glad it is happening in the natural because it has been happening in the spiritual for a long time.   Scriptures that I have looked at from one perspective, are taking on a whole new meaning with my new spiritual lenses.  Some passages are almost entirely opposite to the way I have always viewed them.

Which brings me to what I realized yesterday; it is this.  In New England, we get to enjoy two separate seasons of fall.  There is the flashy colorful foliage which draws the crowds and is a tourist attraction.  That’s when the hills and highways are ablaze with reds and yellows and oranges.  There is hardly a place that is not boldly in your face with color.  All of it is beautiful, sometimes breathtakingly so.  It is the barter of New England.  She hosts a party, puts on her finest dress and people come to see and taste and partake. 

But when the party is over, and the guests go home, there is the “other autumn”; the subtler, genteel autumn.  It’s the autumn only the family gets to enjoy.  To me, it is even more lovely with its varied shades of green and brown and red.  I think I like it better because of the lighting this time of year.  It’s

thinner somehow, more clear and white. There is a period of time in late afternoon when the shadows make every object crazy long.  The silhouettes of the bare trees with the sun setting behind them are my absolute favorite.  I love the black trunks with their branches lifted skyward in naked surrender as the sun goes down behind the horizon in a prouder display of color than you see in summer.  Even the hues of the sunset are richer at this time of year with eggplant purples, hot pink and persimmon oranges.

In this second autumn, there are no leaves left on the trees; they are covering the forest floor, making it look like someone installed a tan woolen carpet with sculpted pile around every tree.  The fields are brown, the hedges are brown, the bushes are brown, but every brown is different, and every shadow and patch of light alters the color to be golden or chocolate or caramel.  Interspersed with the brown are large patches of green from the pine and evergreen trees.  They wear their winter colors, which are the deeper, richer, serious hunkering down greens, and not the yellow greens of spring.  I suppose, if I was an artist, I would take that background as my initial inspiration and add touches of color here and there to enhance the differences.  That’s just what the sumac and the bittersweet and the burning bush shrubs do. 

All across the landscape there are patches of the deep red velvet of sumac and the lacy orange of bittersweet.  I especially enjoy the bittersweet because there is really no orange in the plant…it’s just that from a distance, the yellow husk and the red of the berries make it appear orange to the eye.  It looks delicate and cheerful as it climbs over bushes and even up telephone poles.  Then, dotted here and there to draw the eye into the picture, are the most brilliantly red bushes we call the burning bush.  Their leaves eventually fall off, but in this other autumn, they do not have any competition for brilliancy.  There is not another red anywhere that can compete as they flaunt their fire like boastful eye candy in their assigned places across the landscape.

You miss all that when you just think everything is brown and dreary this time of year.  It’s not dreary, it has just been transformed into something totally different, but beautiful just the same.  The flashy riot of color in the early autumn certainly gets your attention; but the second autumn has a quiet strength that is going to take us right through winter.  It makes a foundation for the blanket of snow and still allows its personality to shine through, as it refuses to tuck everything neatly under the covers.  We can still see some of those saucy berries poking out here and there giving hints that all is not cold and white.

Little did I know that receiving new lenses changes EVERYTHING.  Now I am looking forward to using these new lenses for seeing people differently and situations and conversation and political issues and family members and work environments.  They are probably worth that second look and new interpretation.  I want to make the same commitment with those things that I did with writing.  When I notice something that gives me pause, I will actually pause and consider and look again because people are worth it, conversations are worth it, family members are worth it and I am worth it.