Day Fifty - If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter

Poem by Joe Miller, 1975

Taken from the Annual Report 2018 South African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute.

If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter,

floating a few feet above a field somewhere,

people would come from everywhere to marvel at it.

People would walk around it marvelling at its big pools of water,

its little pools and the water flowing between.

People would marvel at the bumps on it and the holes in it.

They would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it and the water suspended in the gas.

The people would marvel at all the creatures walking around the surface of the ball and at the creatures in the water.

The people would declare it as sacred because it was the only one, and they would protect it so that it would not be hurt.

The ball would be the greatest wonder known,

and people would come to pray to it, to be healed, to gain knowledge,

to know beauty and to wonder how it could be.

People would love it, and defend it with their lives

because they would somehow know that their lives could be nothing without it.

If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter.

Standing back gives us perspective – such a privilege astronauts have to be able to see the earth from space. How thankful I am that God created humans to live on such a wonderful planet; just think what a bleak existence life on Mars or on the Moon would have been.

Our bodies are attuned to this planet earth, we are part of a homogeneous creation that is beautiful. In reading through chapter 1 of the book of Colossians, I realised such a world had not only been created by the Word of God, aka the Logos Christ, but was made ‘for him’.

God gets pleasure too from the world as we do. In fact, in that same chapter of Colossians we learn that God is so attached to his creation that:

For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and by him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of his blood on the cross.

This affirmation of the togetherness of ‘everything’ unifies the spiritual and the physical so that Christ’s work on the cross redeems the earth as well as its inhabitants.

A fitting tribute I think would be to cite more fully Paul’s inspired words of poetry to the church in Colossae.

Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.

He existed before God made anything at all and is supreme over all creation.(Greek says He is the first born of all creation .)

Christ is the one through whom God created everything in heaven and earth.

He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see – kings, kingdoms, rulers and authorities.

Everything has been created through him and for him.

He existed before everything else began, and he holds all creation together.

Colossians 1:15-17 (New Living Translation)

Prayer

Gracious Creating God who sees all across space and time, grant us perspective in all things. Help us to see beyond ourselves, beyond what is immediately in front of us, and to learn to take the longer view. Give us a vision of planet earth as if it were ‘a few feet in diameter’ so precious and vulnerable: and as we marvel at its intricate beauty, may we worship the Christ, through whom and for whom all has been created. Amen.

Elisabeth Sweeney Smith