Finding “Beautiful Thoughts of God” in Nature

My mother raised me with pine needles in her hair, Old Man’s Beard stuck to her clothes, and swirls in her heels filled with dirt. My husband likewise spent his childhood hunting with his father and building forts or ziplines in the trees behind his yard. I knew I wanted the same for my own children. I longed to show them the power of God from the mulch under their feet and the laced branches above their heads.

I later learned it’s one thing to grow up as a child in the woods, and it’s another to be the mother watching her children play in the woods. 

I thought my fear for all that could hurt them would dissipate once one of my toddlers stopped shoving rocks in his mouth, but then he started fleeing to the woods and wouldn’t respond to his name being called. Our in-laws bought a tracking device to keep him safe (and likely to save my own nerves too). This time, I convinced myself the anxieties would be put to rest.

The day after we unearthed the device from its box, though, we received a text from a neighbor: a bear and a pack of coyotes had been spotted near our home. As I read the text, I looked up to see my three children oohing and ahhing in front of the window, and I half expected to see a coyote or bear cub lumbering across the front yard.

For an entire week, I kept my children tucked away inside our house, despite the sun that slanted through our living room windows. What if? Nightmares cycled in my mind as I slept, of wild animals dragging away my children. I woke up with my heart pounding and fear of looking out the windows the next day. Every time I took the garbage out to the bin at the end of our driveway, I swiveled my head like an owl, watching over every corner of our yard. 

Finally, after my mother-in-law took our children outside during one of my at-home appointments, I braved the outdoors again. My heart pounded every time the brush whispered in the wind, and I wondered if the trees that moved were bending under the weight of a fat bear or several coyotes slinking through them.

As time wore on, and no signs of wild animals littered our yard, my body relaxed. Outdoors became a relief and refuge again from a long morning of housework and meal-cooking in the house—until we found the coyote feces and the shredded remains of a seagull.

Nightmares returned; images of wild beasts unlike anything of this world cackling and circling my family and I in some wooded corner of our yard. 

I thought on God’s declaration in Genesis where he named this creation “good” and “very good.” I wondered at how the psalmist said, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1). I remembered Paul writing that God’s divine nature and eternal power are revealed in his handicraft of the world.[1] God, is that still true?

This side of Eden, creation is marred by sin, but God isn’t absent from it. We see not just his fingerprints but his actual hand at work in nature, even when it seems the mountains fall into the sea.[2] He is not a craftsman who made this world and then left it to its own devices, but he continues to hold it up and sustain it, swaying both seas and the hearts of kings.[3] 

Looking at the spiders, the torn carcass, or even the crow limping along our walking path, I have an opportunity with my kids, then, to “point to some lovely flower or gracious tree, not only as a beautiful work, but a beautiful thought of God.”[4] I can show them how he is present within nature’s brokenness and presides over even its dangers.

There has never been a moment in my life in which a spider did not provoke fear, horror, and disgust in me. Then, when my children began toddling outside and their curious fingers reached for the hairy, hanging spider in her web, I snapped my hand out like a viper to draw them back. 

I’d like to name spiders as a thing of the curse, but I know it isn’t true. I’ve watched their cunning webs snag the blackflies that torment and leave welts on my family, and I realize God uses even spiders for his glory and our good. So, rather than imposing my own fears on my children, I can seek to show them God, even in the spider web.

I look forward to the day when we can marvel at all of God’s glorious creation without fear of it biting back—when the nursing child can play over the cobra hole and the young one poke inside the viper nest.[5] Until then, with a mama’s watchful eye, I will continue to guide my children to see the goodness amidst the thorns, even as we long for the day that the briars are burnt up. These thorns will one day sizzle into ash, and both people and creatures will roam the new creation with the knowledge and fear of God, causing no harm to one another.[6] As we await that day, I hope to walk together with my little ones towards that reality, collecting all these “beautiful thoughts” that speak of him.

[1] Romans 1:20

[2] Psalm 46:1–2

[3] Psalm 89:9; Proverbs 21:1; Isaiah 51:15 

[4] Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 5th ed., Vol. 1 (Living Book Press, 2017), 79–80. 

[5] Isaiah 11:6–8

[6] Isaiah 11:9