For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies, for the love which from our birth over and around us lies.
Christ, our Lord, to you we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.
Folliot S. Pierpoint
Saturday I took a drive up through the Shenandoah Valley to Luray Caverns. No, not for fun, I had a work meeting there. Seriously.
But it was a beautiful day for a drive through the mountains. The sky was clear. The flowers were blooming.
I drove through charming small towns that have been there for as many as 200 years.
The drive made me thing about how, as much as I love the ocean, the mountains of Virginia are also beautiful.
I’ll be driving home to my own mountains this weekend. A short visit home to see the parents. At my age, and theirs, you don’t miss those opportunities.
But on my drive I thought, as I often have at the beach, about the absurdity of thinking this all just poofed into existence.
C.S. Lewis said:
“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.”
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