God's Golden Gift: Friendship and the Words of Others

Friday, Mar. 10, 2017

God speaks to me in nature. When I step from the city’s concrete streets onto the dirt paths amid the mountains, trees and water, I feel touched by his grace even if I hear no words. 

An example is illustrated by the photo that accompanies this column. Last Wednesday, the promise of spring weather lured me away from the gym after work. I grabbed my camera and headed out to the Jordan River Parkway, which runs not too far from my house. I’ve passed, countless times, the pond where the rushes shown in the photo grow. Now, in winter, the dead grass is unremarkable; in other seasons it is lushly green and home to a yellow-headed blackbird that is heard more often than seen.

On Wednesday the rays from the setting sun lit those grasses to a golden glow. To me it is a declaration that even the unremarkable, the dead and the dull can gain new life through God. 

Nature always seems to breathe the Holy Spirit even when it takes me time to see it. Nature demands nothing except to be accepted on its own terms – it is fruitless to ask the wind to stop blowing or the snow to stop falling. This may be one reason I enjoy escaping into it, for I know there’s nothing I can control and so I can relax and simply be.  

People, on the other hand, are full of demands. They want my time, my attention and my acknowledgement. They want me to talk and smile and interact, when most times all I want is to go home and shut out the world because I have already given all my energy just to get through another day. 

So I frequently need the reminder that God is present in other people just as he is in nature, and that, as with the natural world, most often I just have to shut up and abandon my own demands so that the way is clear for him to show himself. What is even more wondrous is that when he does so, I am given a double gift: Not only the words of God but the wisdom of the person through whom he speaks, because they bring so much more to the conversation than my own limited experiences and narrow viewpoint.

This was brought home to me once again when I posted the photo on Facebook. I shared it simply because it is beautiful, and I am making an effort to counteract all the negativity on the Web. 

What I got in return was not just “likes” for my photography, which I appreciate, but more significantly the thoughts that the photo sparked in others. Here is the first reply to the photo on Facebook. (Thank you, Tom Deveraux!)      

“Oh, linger, little river!/Your banks are all so fair,/Each morning is a hymn of praise,/Each evening is a prayer./All day the sunbeams glitter/On your shallows and your bars,/And at night the dear God stills you/With the music of the stars.” 

(Excerpt from The River by Frederick G. Scott)

Then, Michael Kennedy quoted Matthew 11:7: “What did you come out to see? A reed swaying in the wind?” He also added this thought: “Parts of our state are like what I have always imagined the Holy Land looks like.”

I am deeply grateful that Tom and Michael shared their reactions, because it gave me a different lens through which to view the world, and created paths of contemplation that I would never had considered had my friends pointed me toward them.

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic.