Day 8 - At the bottom of the world

“Just ask the animals, and they will teach you. Ask the birds of the sky, and they will tell you. Speak to the earth, and it will instruct you. Let the fish in the sea speak to you. For they all know that my disaster has come from the hand of the Lord. For the life of every living thing is in his hand, and the breath of every human being." - Job 12:7-10 (NLT)

Browsing the BBC News website this week, an unusual job advertisement caught my eye. The British Antarctic Survey is recruiting people to live and work in Antarctica — one of the most remote, inhospitable and breathtakingly beautiful places on earth. Scientists, engineers, doctors and chefs are among those being sought to spend months, sometimes the whole year, in a landscape of ice, silence and extraordinary light.

It made me pause. What a world away from our familiar rhythms of nature — the grey drizzle of February, the first tentative snowdrops, the muddy walks. Antarctica is a place where temperatures can plunge to minus sixty degrees, where the sun disappears for months at a time, and where the nearest town is a very long way indeed! And yet, people go. They feel drawn there. Something in the human spirit is called towards the edges of the world.

Perhaps that instinct is not so different from the one that draws us into ASecludedPlace during Lent.

Job knew something about being stripped back to the essentials. In the midst of his suffering and confusion, he turns not to clever arguments or theological debate, but to the natural world. Ask the animals, he says. Ask the birds. Speak to the earth. Let the fish in the sea speak to you. There is a profound humility in this. Job is suggesting that creation itself carries wisdom — that if we would only stop and listen, the world around us has something to teach us about God, about life, and about our own smallness.

In Antarctica, that smallness becomes impossible to ignore. Those who have worked there speak of a silence so deep it feels like a presence. They describe the overwhelming sense of being held within something vast and ancient — glaciers that have existed for millions of years, skies that pulse with the aurora australis, penguin colonies going about their lives with cheerful indifference to human concerns. Creation, in its most undisturbed form, simply is — and it speaks.

We may never stand on the Antarctic ice, but Job's invitation is open to all of us, wherever we are. A garden in February. A park at dusk. The behaviour of starlings. The way frost patterns a windowpane. Creation is not a backdrop to our lives — it is, as Job reminds us, held in the very hand of God. Every living thing, every breath, every creature finding its way through winter.

This Lent, might we practise the art of asking? Not with words, but with quiet attention. To step outside, look around, and allow the world in which we live to instruct us — gently, patiently, as it always has.

For the life of every living thing is in his hand.

Neil Chappell