Creation
Creation
In All Its Most Precious Essence
Often it is said water is the blood of the earth. Yes, I'm a ‘lucky one’ in so many ways. One of the best of my ‘lucks’ is when I immerse myself in the great freshwater sea, Michigan. After I finish my walk on the trail of hope and prayer, I move the car down about one hundred yards to the east. From there it is about a fifty yard walk to the water's edge. While our bodies are between fifty-five and sixty percent H2O, the earth’s surface is nearly seventy-one percent.
Leaving the car with my towels, the key to the car, the float tube and sometimes my cell phone, I walk across a sand so fine and clean, the only exception is what nature leaves on it. At about twenty feet from where the earth’s lifeblood meets the shore, I put down everything except the tube and in I go.
The Big Lake, which we call Lake Michigan, resembles a giant bathtub surrounding the Leelanau, the ‘Little Finger’ (and we live in ‘The Inside’ of this ‘Little Finger’) of the Great Lakes State. As you walk into the water, it is stunningly glass crystal clear. I trudge out unevenly until I can use the floater for steadiness and then to chest deep.
At that depth, you still see your feet as clear as if you are on the shore. It is so pure, you see the fine sand on the bottom appearing like ridges you might see in a vast and windblown desert, only detailed in the finest miniature replica. Here I plunge under and open my eyes, peering into a blue clarity unlike any other place on earth. Then I simply hang on the tube, tiptoeing back and forth or bobbing in slight swells or waves, in a pleasantness so cool, I call it water you can wear on a hot summer day.
Up until about eight years ago, Lake Michigan was my primary air conditioner until it just was too consistently hot. After almost thirty years a couple miles north of the 45th Parallel, we had to get a/c. Still, the freshwater sea calls – and I go.
Water as we know it, is our most precious resource. There is not, nor would there be, life without it. I talk about life as us living breathing Images created in His Image and Likeness and I remind us our spiritual lives begin with water in baptism. To prove how ultimate His love is for us, the last act of his temporal existence, as one of us, water flowed out of His side after the blood ran dry. He shed every drop for everyone!!
As I bob and tiptoe, I often turn a slow three hundred and sixty degrees, taking in the horizon from widely massive views where there is nothing but water, to the ‘Little Bear’ islands that dot the great sea offshore, to the land with its iconic Whaleback dune and Pyramid Point, then back around again. And again. And again, often spying seven-hundred foot freighters.
This water heals. It heals me every time I go into it. It heals the earth every time it falls from the sky, returning from where it came, like so many prophets describe in the book we call The Word, The Biblos (Greek), The Bible!!.
I do not write about what we've done to the blood of mother earth - this most critical element of our existence allowing us to live in His creation. I ‘speak’ about it only because of the wondrous glory and joy that it represents, not just in its life giving nature, but in how it actually feels up here, a little over halfway to the North Pole.
You see, even in this I see Hope.
No, the water here is not perfectly clean. Traces of pollution are still carried through the skies from places far far away, hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. There was a day when we were told never to eat the fish from our freshwater sea if we wanted to become pregnant or were pregnant. If you fell into a category other than these two and you were over twelve, you could supposedly eat it once a week if it was under a half a pound.
However maybe some of those days are now behind us, because Native Americans, Commercial Fishermen and Fisherwomen, and Sports Fisher people worked together with the DNR to help clean it up some and manage the inhabitants wisely, perhaps temporarily, but hopefully permanently… because we chose, for once, to be the stewards He wants us to be…
Of His Creation. All of it… and it is a beautiful example of how we worked as ONE to make it right!!!
clement