In our house, Wednesday is nature group day. At the start of September, I launched a nature group for home educated children, in conjunction with our church. Every week a group of us meet in a large park (large by British standards of maintained parks, at least) for a nature walk, story time and activities linked to a weekly theme. When the weather is particularly bad, we hurry down the road to the church hall into the dry. The vast majority of those who come would not describe themselves as having a personal faith in Jesus or regularly attend church so I hope it will be a low-pressure way to just get people comfortable stepping into the church.
We've wandered around the park eight times now. Occasionally we'll venture into some open access public land at the bottom of the park but our routes are familiar enough that the children who come regularly can usually predict where we'll go next. I try to mix it up some weeks and start off in a different direction but there are only so many paths in the park so sooner or later we end up on one of our usual paths.
After the first few weeks, I was worried that the children coming would get bored. Familiarity would breed contempt and they would just want to go somewhere new. But just a couple of months in and I see that the opposite is true. We might be treading the same paths in the same park but every week there's something new to see as we watch the seasons change in the park, from summer through autumn and now entering winter.
I'm more enthusiastic than knowledgeable about nature so every week sees me researching and learning about that week's subject. I hadn't really been particularly looking forward to last week's fungi topic and this week's mosses and lichen. But I read a bit about fungi and last week we peered into undergrowth and poked around decomposing logs and I was amazed at just how many varieties and the sheer quantity of fungi that we found. I'd just never really been looking for them before.
This week we didn't need to hunt down at the ground because the moss and lichen was right in front of us on the trees - and even lichen growing on metal. We meandered through the park and I marvelled at all the moss and lichen that I'd never really noticed before. In fact, I had wondered beforehand if we'd even find a particular type of lichen, convinced that I hadn't seen it before in the park. There were so many trees covered with this type of lichen I couldn't help but laugh at myself. I'd just not been looking closely enough before.
As we walk many of the same paths each week, I'm starting to build up a mental map of the park. I know where we can find a whole collection of ferns and where the horse chestnut trees are and the pine trees. I checked today the small patch of ground where I was astonished to find the famous red-with-white-spots fly agaric fungi last week, to see if they were still there (they were). I know that if I'm lucky, I'll find frogs in the fountain at the right time of year and that the wildflowers bloom longer than I expected and the leaves change colour later. And it's only November. I wondered if the children (and adults) would get bored in the park and now I'm starting to see that there's so much to explore, so much that I don't even know that I don't know. I'm not asking if there's enough to keep a group of children interested now, I'm wondering how we'll ever fit in everything I want to cover. There's so much to wonder at.
I hope my knowledge and experience of, and relationship with, God is like that park. After being a Christian for a number of years, it's easy to think that maybe the familiarity of the Christian life is just a bit boring. I've trodden the paths of listening to a sermon at church each week, reading the Bible, praying and taking communion for a while (although nowhere near as many years as others) and there's a risk that I might think that I've been here many times before and there's nothing new to see.
But I want to watch in awe as the passing seasons and years reveal the never-changing God from slightly different angles. I want to learn more about God by digging around in the undergrowth of the doctrines that I hold firmly to in order to find the things I'd never paid much attention to before. I want to learn more about God by lifting up my eyes and realising that there's so much in plain sight that I'd never thought to look for before. I want to see that same landscape in all the different weathers, to see that the core truths of the faith are just as solid and real in the foggy weather of doubt as they are in the blazing sunshine of God's clear and unmistakeable answers to prayer. I want to walk those means of grace again and again knowing that the paths may be the same but there is always more to understand, more to see, more to experience. More to wonder at, more to thank God for, more to turn into praise.
