Fall, 2010

This is our second fall in the new house and we continue to appreciate the beauty around us. James wrote a beautiful personal essay on our "God-bathed world", which follows:

Friends,

I’m up reading this morning about our lives together in a God-bathed world, as Dallas Willard puts it in his work The Divine Conspiracy. As I look out on the lights across the pond heralding the arrival of the staff to begin their daily work to prepare for us at Sugartree, I am cognizant of a renewed (new/old)understanding about the importance of panorama in our lives, and the blessing we have when we have access to it.

I spent two special nights this week with my special friends the Pomeroy’s in their lofty perch above the City of Austin. I cannot remember why it was so, but just before retiring John handed me a book of essays about The Eiffel Tower and Other Mysteries, as if I had come there for that purpose. The first essay discussed the Tower, thoroughly, in a way that only those who have been blessed to experience it first-hand can appreciate. Embedded in the monologue was a premise about panorama and its relationship to our intelligence, which was enlightening to me. It began to explain why we seek it, need it, and why having experienced it opens our senses in a way no other experience can. Our ability to understand is enhanced as we are lifted to heights, or in other ways able assimilate a broader view of the world around us.

That may be why we yearn for the cottage in the landscape or the loft in the city. It may also be why the impoverished, either physically or spiritually, have little imagination. It may be our duty to help with that.

Have a God-bathed day.

James