A moment of peace on God's green earth

This summer I have embarked upon a journey, an adventure which has taken me far from my home and has revealed some of the incredible diversity and majesty of the planet we all share. I set out, alone for the first time, from North Carolina to San Francisco en route to Sequoia Lake, California. This is an adventure which has taken me from a great center of modern culture to a refuge of natural beauty — spanning both the complexity and simplicity of the Earth. Never before has it been so apparent that God is the one unifying factor in all creation, a fact that seems obvious enough, but one that loses clarity and becomes obscure in the practice of living.

As I sat on the plane to San Francisco, with my cell phone off, listening to my iPod, I couldn't wait to get to my hostel, connect to Wi-Fi, and check my Facebook. San Francisco is an international city which displays an incredible parade of humanity. I was truly amazed by this city of high culture, socioeconomic diversity, intellectual stimulation, and engineering majesty. I was amazed by the things I saw, but I found God in a small meditation room on the second floor of the Asian art museum. For what seemed like hours, I stared into a still water puddle atop a flat stone, surrounded by thousands of years of artistic representations of human culture. I faced the overwhelming thought that all people, from all places and all times, were created by and united under one God — by extension, that I in that moment was connected to all things past, present and future.

After my stay in San Francisco was complete, I embarked on a journey that was completely different. I traveled by train through the golden Central Valley of California on my way to the mountains for training at my job as a counselor at YMCA Camp Tulequoia. The camp is located on a lake surrounded by mountains, just east of Sequoia National Park. Sequoia Lake is an oasis in the midst of Cyprus and Sequoia trees. On the day before training began, I had the opportunity to explore the area. I meandered around the lake and eventually stumbled upon a path that ran parallel to a trickling stream and lush, green grass and trees. I finally settled down beneath a gentle waterfall. While watching the wildlife below and embracing the misting of the waterfall, I prayed. I prayed that I would be able to find joy in the purest and simplest manifestation of God's creation, and share that joy with others.

The outstanding beauty, complexity, variety, and simplicity of that portion of God's creation that we know is often difficult to fathom. How can the joy of nature's pure splendor be comparable to the intellectual clarity, historical connectivity, and emotional fulfillment of human cultural complexity? Such things seem contradictory, but I find peace in both aspects of creation because each makes obvious the unity of all people under God — the sense that such purposeful beauty of meaning cannot be derived from chaos. The world we share and the historical cultural identity we have developed as God's children tie us to our creator and our desire to be one with God's creation.