Take Some Time for Renewal and Resistance

The other day, I was going through pictures on my phone, deleting old ones to make space for an update. I didn’t think twice about getting rid of pics I’d taken in frantic moments—too many angles of a group picture, screenshot reminders of tasks long since completed. But I paused when I came across some pictures from a hike my family and I took together last June around Lake Leatherwood in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

Usually, it’s easy for me to throw out pictures that don’t have human beings in them. These images, though—these digital depictions of lily pads on nearly still water, shepherded by an encapsulation of green trees under a blue sky, filled with light gray clouds keeping the sun at bay—these pictures of an indescribable moment held my attention saying, “You’d better not throw me away, and you’d do well to not hide me in the recesses of your camera roll. Take some time with me. You need what I have to give you more than you realize.”

Rachel Carson, a biologist and author known for her writings on environmental pollution and the natural history of the sea, wrote, “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” I think that’s what the prophet Isaiah was getting at when he said in Isaiah 40:31, “Those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength.” Those who wait. Those who take time.

It’s one thing to go outside for some fresh air, or to take a stroll down a nature trail, but it’s an act of intentional renewal to stop and take it all in. It is a spiritual discipline to pause and meditate on the magnitude of creation, and to contemplate that you are both a microscopic speck in the midst of it and an essential part of the whole of it, while God—the Creator of every good—holds all of it in Their hand. Whether it’s with a picture on your phone or on a bench outside your workplace or on a hike somewhere, taking time to “be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10) can renew your strength with perspective that your innermost thoughts know to be true, but that our everyday thinking easily forgets.

This goes beyond meditative renewal, though. Taking time to be still and to be reconnected with your inmost thoughts is not just an act of renewal; it’s an act of resistance.

Another translation of Isaiah 40:31 reads, “Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength; they will fly up on wings like eagles; they will run and not be tired; they will walk and not be weary.” To pause and take in the beauty of creation is to hold a defying hand up to the mess being made of it by human acts of pollution, and to be filled—renewed—with vision for how the earth we share is supposed to be treated. Taking time to acknowledge the earth’s beauty and how God’s creation provides for us in every moment of every day gives us the strength we need to resist the oppression and evil that threaten this world every moment of every day. Basking in the goodness of the world we share gives me the power to declare from my inmost being, “World, you can bully me and my neighbors with your death-dealing threats of environmental degradation and climate change, of racism and white supremacy, of authoritarianism and fascism, of ableism, misogyny, and queer phobia, of power-grabbing and war-mongering—but you cannot win. I will not be bullied into submitting myself to apathy, indifference, or the lie that cruelty will save me from today’s manmade chaos; because my hope is in the Lord, the Holy One who gives me vision for what the world really is and how it should always be, the Creator of all good things, my Savior and my God.”

So, take some time for renewal. Take some time for resistance. We all need it. And the world needs us.