What does a pastor do when he's not in the saddle on a Sunday morning?
Yesterday I was enjoying a cup of coffee, a mountain view, and extra time in the Word (you can click here for the back story).
A few days ago I discovered that Charles Haddon Spurgeon read the Psalms (all 150 of them) once a month. Hmmm! If its good enough for Spurgeon . . . I decided to up my intake of the Psalms!
I was reading Psalm 145, but when my eyes landed on verse fivemy reading stopped.
On the glorious splendor of your majesty,
and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.
Here I was in the Smoky Mountains with beauty everywhere I turned. I could either continue to read about God's majesty or I could go and soak it up for myself. So with my iPhone in my pocket and my camera over my shoulder I set off for higher ground.
Why the iPhone? Brandon Wells, our Worship Pastor, filled in for me yesterday. My phone enabled me to listen to Brandon's message over the web. It was fantastic. In fact, I listened to it twice. Yes, it was that good!
As I walked along that unpaved country road, I had King David whispering in my ear and Brandon Wells preaching from my pocket. If that wasn't enough to make up for my absence from church, the voice of Elizabeth Barrett Browning resurrected from my subconscious. Browning wrote Aurora Leigh in 1857. Her famous line from the work says:
“Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes -
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”
Ahhh! King David, Brandon Wells, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I was delightfully triple-teamed. So I sought the majesty of God in the common bushes of a North Carolina country road while being wonderfully instructed on how to Plan Wisely from Brandon's message from the book of Proverbs.
One of the things that Brandon mentioned in his message was this, "You don't need new truth. You need new eyes to see old truth."
The old truth -- spoken by David and echoed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning -- is that the majesty of God is all around us. In my pictures below you can catch a glimpse of God's majesty. I pray that as you look, our Lord Himself gives you new eyes to see his wonders.
So there I was. The beauty of the horizon stretching out in front of me, the ground crunching beneath my feet, my shutter clicking, my heart beating, bees buzzing, crickets chirping, and my mind flooded with the wonders and mystery of God. And right there--like all the creation surrounding me--I stretched toward the heavens and raised my hands in praise.