In Kenya when I was a child, as I mentioned earlier, each year our family spent several weeks just down the coast from Watamu near Malindi. In 1968 the area was made a marine park. No molluscs or fish could be taken. I had no interest in killing anything.  However, I did love looking for a shell in the very narrow window of time between the natural death of the mollusc before it was damaged by sand and tide. Not long after the area was made a marine park, I found a beautiful and empty leopard cowry and brought and showed it to dad with great excitement. He said I had to put it back. I nodded but I wasn’t happy. I hadn’t killed anything!  Then I learned something from my sister. 

She has always loved tiny things and had discovered that between the raised ripples of sand, there were drifts of slightly bigger sand that included very tiny shells.  No one could possibly mind that, they were smaller than sand, and on the beach would fall apart in days. I spent hours sitting on my heels looking. There were tiny white cowry shells, green, golden, pattered coiled shells. One still had to wait because there were tiny hermit crabs too, elegant little things with delicate multicolored legs. If a shell was empty, it was a treasure. I’ve kept some of these minute gems for over 50 years. In the photo are a few of those tiny shells I still have. I put a quarter in the image for scale.

At first, to me this ability to see tiny beauty seemed to apply only to the tiny shells. But that wasn’t true!  That lesson of looking for small beauty came to fruition for me years later when we lived in East Texas. I was a faculty member at LeTourneau University. There was very little access to large sweeps of wilderness, and I felt stifled by the humid forest chopped into small squares by human use. Then I started to look at the small scale.  So much beauty in what was left of the East Texas ecosystems! I couldn’t take the beauty home in my hand as I could with the tiny shells, but I could begin to learn macro photography.  The healing joy of seeing and deeply focusing on God’s creation was there even without big sweeps of wilderness.

 To me all the beauty shows God’s signature, his joy. The hymn writer was so right! More than 100 years ago, 29-year-old Folliett Pierpoint was so overwhelmed by the beauty of creation that he wrote the lovely hymn many of you may know:

When I began to really look, it turned out this loving beauty really is over and around us all our lives.  The shone even in my kitchen. A thin slice of carrot, or an orange segment held up to the light is more beautiful and intricate than stained glass.  

Apparently the hymn writer had originally written the chorus to For the Beauty of the Earth differently than is commonly used today.  He had written, “Christ our God, to Thee we raise this our Sacrifice of Praise.”  It seems to me he words “sacrifice of praise” are especially true when we have difficult circumstances and looking for the beauty around us takes a bit of discipline. Even at the coast in Kenya, as a child, initially I had to struggle to be willing to look for tiny shells rather than the bigger ones I thought I wanted.

The sacrifice of giving up anger and frustration and bowing our heads to look for what is around us is still a struggle for me.  But when I do look and open my heart to accept, he opens such doors to joy.

Yes, and amen to the hymn, “Lord of all, to thee we raise, this our hymn of grateful praise.”