Landscapes

Our Sussex coastline is arguably among the most beautiful scenery on our planet. It's not difficult to see God's hand in a brightly sunlit landscape on a beautiful Autumn morning. I consider it truly an honour to live here.

But if the challenge of George Herbert's hymn is to see God in all things, then a country landscape becomes the easy bit. What about inner cities and shantytowns? What about the crumbling sarcophagus around the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl - or the landscapes of Eastern Europe scarred by rusting factories and pollution. What about the sprawling favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the impoverished villages of sub-Saharan Africa, the shacks along the road leading into Mumbai?

And over it all looms the disputed question of climate change - the growing impact of global warming on the diversity and richness of our natural world. It all looks like a world from which God has been squeezed out.

Or maybe not. Perhaps we can see Him - shaking His head over our so imperfect efforts to use what we have been given to create wealth and quality of life - helping us to learn how to build the new without damaging the old and to begin to find answers to the long term questions of climate change and the environment so that what God has given to us, we can hand on to others.

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Teach Me My God and King

In all things Thee to see

And what I do in anything

To do it as for Thee

Gracious Lord, You have bestowed upon us a world of beauty and wonder. Teach us to recapture our child-like sense of awe when we look at our world – Your world, that we may see beyond the minutiae of our own flaws and embrace the true beauty that is before us. Amen

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Having a Good Death

Your Preference - Spots or Wrinkles?

Falling in Love at Clapham Junction