Comfort Through Creation: The Blessing of Biographies

This is the second part of a series entitled “Comfort Through Creation.” The goal of this series is to enhance our wonder at God through the world he has made, and we can do this in a variety of ways. In the same manner that a diamond has a hundred different cuts that reflect light at various angles, the life-giving beauty of God’s world can come to us from just as many directions. The first part of this series examined how we can marvel at God by having the sun, moon, and billions of stars in the galaxy instruct us. This post will come at the same overall topic – wonder and awe of God’s creation – through a more subtle angle: biography.

If you’ve ever read a biography (or autobiography) of someone’s life, you’ve likely experienced “borrowing” from that person’s experience or perspective. In other words, that person said or experienced something in such a way that it put words to something you needed to hear or strongly benefited from. When it comes to seeing the wonders of God through the world he has made, I’ll mention three names we would benefit learning from: Jonathan Edwards, Charles Spurgeon, and C.S. Lewis.

Jonathan Edwards was a pastor/theologian/philosopher who lived in New England in the 1700s. He was known for looking and seeing everywhere evidence of God in the world around him. David Brainerd, a missionary to the Native Americans during the same period of time, grew a friendship with Edwards. In some ways, they were an unlikely pairing. Not only was Brainerd younger, but his disposition was much different. He apparently struggled depression and physical ailments for the entirety of his life, which was cut short at age 29 because of sickness. Speaking of Brainerd, John Piper says:

“We will forgive him for this [cheerless outlook on nature] quickly because none of us has suffered physically what he suffered or endured the hardships he did in the wilderness. It is hard to relish the beauty of a rose when you are coughing up blood. But we have to see this as part of Brainerd’s struggle because an eye for beauty instead of bleakness might have lightened some of his load….[T]here is a costly downside to an unimaginative mind. In Brainerd’s case, it meant that he seemed to see nothing in nature but a ‘howling wilderness’ and a bleak enemy. There was nothing in his diaries like the transports of Jonathan Edwards as he walked in the woods and saw images of divine glory and echoes of God’s excellence everywhere.”

So while we want to respect and learn from Brainerd greatly (he has been an inspiration to many missionaries in the centuries since then), we also want to imitate Edwards more when it comes to leveraging creation for the sake of personal health and joy in God.

Charles Spurgeon was a London pastor in the 1800s and has become known as the “prince of preachers.” Speaking of areas of potential pitfalls for aspiring preachers, Spurgeon said:

“To sit long in one posture, pouring over a book, or driving a quill, is in itself a taxing of nature; but add to this a badly ventilated chamber, a body which has long been without muscular exercise, and a heart burdened with many cares, and we have all the elements for preparing a seething cauldron of despair, especially in the dim months of fog . . . Nature outside his window is calling him to health and beckoning him to joy. He who forgets the humming of the bees among the heather, the cooing of the wood-pigeons in the forest, the song of the birds in the woods, the rippling of rills among the rushes, and the sighing of the wind among the pines, needs not wonder if his heart forgets to sing and his soul grows heavy.”

These were not ivory-tower theologian words by Spurgeon. Not only was his ministry an incredibly busy one, he also struggled regularly with depression and bodily ailments all his life. He knew of what he was speaking. He needed the beauty of creation to enliven his soul.

Our last biographical character we’ll look at is C.S. Lewis, the great Christian literary giant of the 20th century. In describing his childhood, Lewis recounts, “Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did….As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.” This beauty echoed throughout his childhood and into adulthood, eventually culminating in his conversion to Christ. It was an illusory pursuit of beauty that eventuated in Lewis discovering who all the beauty pointed to. It was later that he described—through using creation as an analogy—how beauty was a pointer:

“I was standing today in a dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, ninety-odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.”

Experiencing the goodness of God via his creation often can happen directly by interacting with creation itself (e.g., a walk through the woods, viewing a sunrise or sunset, listening to the birds chirping, etc.). However, this can also happen indirectly via more subtle means, such as experiencing the merits of God’s world second-hand through others who have gone before us. May we learn from those who have lived at other times and in other places, and may their words and experiences spur us on to wonder and awe at the God they served.