A Songwriter’s 3 Thousand Foot View of Life
My Dear Misfit Friends & Puzzle Pieces,
As you may know, my focus lately has centered around finding stillness amidst my mental wandering and stress-inducing thought patterns. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered a means of achieving this, and from an incredibly unlikely source. I found a message of peace buried in between the lines of Ecclesiastes; a book of the Bible notorious for its rather depressing take on life from this 3-thousand-foot vantage point. This week, however, I uncovered another source of perspective from one of my favorite songwriters that eliminates melancholy altogether and dives headfirst into wonder.
Psalm 104 immerses the reader in alliterative descriptions of God such as walking on the wings of the wind and goosebump--inducing word pictures, like this one, of the birth of creation:
At Your rebuke the water fled;
At the sound of Your thunder they hurried away----
Mountains rose and valleys sank----
To the place You established for them
This song of creation includes the water cycle and the Circle of Life, in a manner of speaking. After the flourishing trees and grasslands come humankind. There’s no pomp and circumstance surrounding our inclusion, just another piece in a much larger puzzle----
He causes the grass to grow for the livestock
And provides crops for man to cultivate,
Producing food from the earth.
This is it. These lines are the only mention of humans in the entire song before moving on to the creatures that live in the mountains and oceans. It is a song focused on remembering who God is and all the moving parts of life on planet earth, past and present, because this is how they operate. Together. As a whole.
Now, this isn’t to say God doesn’t care about the individual at all. Jesus Himself declared But even the hairs of your head have all been counted. Why would He pay such close attention to extraneous details like this one if He saw us merely as cogs in the wheels of time holding together His magnum opus? There wouldn’t be much purpose in creating deeply sentient beings if this were it now would there? For this reason, I encourage you to take care when contemplating life from a 3-thousand-foot view.
My favorite part of the entire song is this:
Here is the sea, vast and wide,
Teaming with creatures beyond number----
Living things both large and small.
There the ships move about,
And Leviathan, which You formed to play.
When wrapped up in my daily life, I forget the God of empathy, connection, and relationship is also the God of incredible power, spoken of so casually I do a double take because the songwriter is not referring to a romping canine, but Leviathan, a monstrous sea beast as unpredictable and beautifully dangerous as the sea itself.
Where Leviathan plays. What an incredible understanding this 3-thousand-foot view of life brings. I am cared for by the One who not only tames the seas but created Leviathan just to watch it play. Now there’s something to ponder.
All this to say, dear friends, there is so much about the goings on of the world we as humans cannot fathom and, frankly, were never intended to understand. This can bring comfort when allowed and also make one not so centered on self, which honestly is the catalyst in stress-relief.
Comments