Sunday Musings from the Hot Tub 3/4/2012

This morning's view from our hot tub. What a beautiful Sunday morning

A view of God's creation from our glacier hike out of McCarthy, Alaska.

The little Downy woodpecker that visits our feeder.

When I got up this morning I was determined to get everything done and get to church on time. And then I looked outside to see that it was snowing. Not the cold, wintery, yuck snow but the soft, fluffy silent snow that always appears to be dropping straight down from the heavens themselves. So I promptly changed my former plan and went outside and melted myself into the warm waters of our hot tub. Snowy nights are my very favorite time to sit in the hot tub but this morning was equally beautiful. As I sat there watching the large flakes falling into the water around me, I could hear the churring of the Red-bellied woodpecker and the "peet" retort of the Downy. In the background I could hear the nuthatch as he busily transported one seed at a time from the feeder to a crevice in the bark of the tree behind him. My thoughts turned to the Sunday school lesson that we would be discussing later this morning. It comes from a series by Adam Hamilton called "When Christians Get It Wrong". Today we would be talking about science and politics and how we as Christians often turn others away by being so closed minded. Even Galileo, a believer in God, was charged with heresy when he proposed his theory that the sun revolved around the earth and not the other way around, as the religious scholars believed from writings in the Bible. Christians sometimes get so hung up on how God created the world and all it's living things in 7 days that I believe they lose the wonder of the creation itself. Hamilton explains it this way. God didn't write Genesis to tell us exactly how he created, only that he did, and it was good. Why is it that some Christians feelso threatened by science? I like to think that science often magnifies and enhances God's handiwork. When I think about about the many wonders of nature and how over millions of years, one celled organisms could evolve into the living things that we know, it makes the creations of our God even more impressive. As I watch the snow flakes, I remember that someone, who must have had way too much time on his or her hands, determined that every snowflake is unique. Knowing this does not lessen the beauty of the snowflake, it makes it even more wonderous. You only need to see a double rainbow, a waterfall, the Grand Canyon or the miracle of a newborn to realize that God is indeed an awesome God. Even if God spent the time to explain the details to me, I'm sure I wouldn't understand. I am startled from my thoughts by the sound of a new bird. It appears that our resident Cooper's hawk has come visiting, prompting the song birds to dive for cover and I quickly see, by the time, that I really do need to start getting ready for church.