Heaven and Nature Sing: 5 Days to Reflect During AdventSample

In December, it’s hard to believe that the earth ever brought forth life or that it ever will again.

But winter also brings the holidays, and so we do our best to be merry despite the landscape around us. We wrap bare limbs and sleeping bushes in brightly colored lights, as the miracle of electricity compensates for their previous buds and blooms. We stoke fires to make up for the sun’s absence and fuel them with seasoned wood, disproportionately pleased by our ability to salvage light and heat from death. We’ll scour the woods for bits of green—Virginia pine, holly, eastern hemlock, and if we’re lucky, mistletoe—and drape them along the mantle, windowsills, doorways, and banisters.

I wonder, though, if we’re really scouring for hope—searching for those small, steady promises that reassure us that the gathering night and the present interlude is only temporary. I wonder if, like the earth itself, we’re waiting—holding our breath in anticipation, longing to believe that something more is happening, and that something more is coming. I wonder if we’re all just waiting for God to show up.

Yes, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the earth shows forth his handiwork just as Psalm 19 says they do. And yes, when I gaze into the inky blackness of a December night and see a thousand points of light, I can almost hear a chorus of praise. But when I see a mountaintop cut bare for the minerals beneath or I remember the whirlwinds that level neighborhoods or I watch on the news as fires consume home and forest alike, I hear something else. I hear a groaning that mirrors my own. I hear a longing and a pain that cries out for redemption.

And I find in nature an unexpected ally in the work of hope.

So in this season, as we celebrate the Creator who took on flesh and came to his creation, we do so in solidarity with an entire cosmos. Here in these moments of Advent and Nativity, heaven and nature sing, teaching a truth we cannot know without the witness of both. It is a story of bodies and skies and beasts and trees—all waiting for the glory that will be revealed when the Son of God comes to his own. It is a story of longing and incarnation, of the earth receiving a flesh-and-blood Redeemer, first as a Baby and one day forever as its King.