This Is My Father’s World

He reveals deep and hidden things;
    he knows what lies in darkness,
    and light dwells with him. - Daniel 2:22

I used to run early in the morning. For the most part my mind would focus on breathing but sometimes my mind would conjure up some horrific images of what could happen to me on a wooded path with a background of darkness. Add the occasional glowing eyes of an animal, usually a deer, but once I think it was a family of foxes. The mix of imagination, unexpected animals on the path, and the darkness before dawn was enough sometimes to cause me to revert back to an old childhood habit of mine.

I would sing. Not real loud or anything, whisper quiet actually, but always the same song. This Is My Father’s World:

This is my Father’s world,

and to my listening ears

all nature sings, and round me rings

the music of the spheres.

This is my Father’s world:

I rest me in the thought

of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;

his hand the wonders wrought.

Maltbie D. Babcock

This old hymn I heard in church. I found a solace in these words. A sweet reminder as a young child still resonated in my life as an adult. This Is My Father’s World… It is all His.

There is not a leaf floating in the breeze or animal roaming that is not His. And I know people own land and of course can say it belongs to them but really in the bigger scheme it is all God’s. There is something blessedly sacred in knowing this. This also is God’s grace.

That this is my Father’s world and I own nothing yet I own everything by proxy, this is one of those mysterious things that seems to lace it’s way only up so far before my mind seems to close up and a door shuts in my face. It seems the hint of questioning takes away immediately all that I know to be true of God. At least what I personally know to be true about this Father of mine.

When Jesus asked the woman at the well for water in the heat of the afternoon. He says something remarkable when He tells her, ” If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” John 4:10

It’s hard to trust a God we hardly have any experience with. When we encounter Him on morning runs and at wells and all the other multiple places He seems to invite us into, isn’t He still asking the same question?

Not really the tangible water drawn up, but the intangible thing. You asking Him to fill you with living water.