“While the earth remains…” assured its founder, “I will never again curse the ground on account of man…” Instead, according to Creator’s worded promise “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter and day and night shall not cease.” We’ve all taken this for granted, this gentle cycling of life on earth. Like children in comfortable homes, we think it is our due that things should stay as nice as they are. We’ve even assumed we had something to do with all this. It’s ours. Men and women of every nation and time have regularly assumed too much.

Long ago rhythms were set in place and we live within them. Light itself has a pulsing rhythm of particles inside waves. Sound has vibration cycles. Waters have rising and falling tides, responding to a moon which waxes and wanes. Nations rise and fall throughout time. And even our individual beating hearts carry a charted rhythm throughout our waking and sleeping. We can track, even influence modulations in pulse, but none of us constructed nor originated our heart function. When this pattern goes flatlined, we are already gone. Rhythms are embedded, they are a given, a sustaining gift for a time. I consider them all a marker of big-picture reality, and if the Creator’s words are heeded, a sign of hope.

As I type today, troops and ships and missiles are moving in positions. For a number of years now I have sensed the waning in my own proud nation. I even felt the earth shake subtly one afternoon, and when I saw the hummingbird feeder moving like a metronome, I knew we were entering the beginning of birthing pangs. Now, many are bewildered at the rapid increases of change, “what’s happening?!” is their wide-eyed cry. The word “unprecedented” is used so often now by talking heads that it (and they) are loosing any meaning.

The painting I highlight at the top of my post this month is in my icons collection on this website. This image is a simple small thing, made of alcohol inks on coated paper. Obviously a landscape, but for me the undulating hills are a symbol of the rising and the falling that happens in all things. All around on the ground, where any one of us stands, are bigger things working, way bigger and especially above. And to give anyone a greater sense of it, Jesus said to his pretty clueless followers basically to “look up”.

It would be valuable to see the whole chapter of warnings He said this in. He didn’t give them a candy-coated pep talk, but rather a gentle pointed wake-up call, and then finally: “He told them a story. ‘Look at a fig tree. Any tree for that matter. When the leaves begin to show, one look tells you that summer is right around the corner. The same here—when you see these things happen, you know God’s kingdom is about here. Don’t brush this off: I’m not just saying this for some future generation, but for this one, too—these things will happen. Sky and earth will wear out; my words won’t wear out.’ “

Luke 21 in the Message Translation