Concrete and Trees

I work in an office. It's a very bland office. The building is one story and white. The walls inside are white. We don't have any fancy artwork or really cool furniture. In fact, most of the furniture consists of mix-matched pieces from closed offices and leftovers. I am not sure how to describe the carpet. I think it used to be a maroon, or mauve, speckled with other random colors. It's now some odd form of faded and worn pink.

I spend about an hour driving to work every day. Driving from Elk Grove to Rocklin requires that I take Highway 99 North. If you know this highway, you know it is not the most pleasant drive during rush hour. Traffic is abysmal, and the scenery is nothing that should distract you. It's a lot of cars and concrete, not much else.

From there I end up on Highway 80 Eastbound. Have you ever counted the number of lanes on this stretch of road? At one point there are six lanes in one direction, funneling people to their destinations. It's a massive amount of concrete road, and concrete retaining walls, stretching as far as the eye can see.

Every weekday, I make the 35 mile trek to my office. I pull in to the small parking lot, and park right in front of the building. Over the years I've developed a habit of sitting in my car for a few minutes. Often times I take a moment and say a prayer. I thank God for the safe travel and ask for His guidance through the day. I ask to be a shining light of His love while I'm at work. I would like to tell you I do this every morning, but I don't. I am a creature of habit, but I am also lazy. Sometimes I just sit there and stare at the building. Other times, I don't even recognize what I'm doing. I just sit.

Eventually I get out of my car. It's about 20 or 30 steps to the door, and then I'm in the office for the next nine hours. My desk faces a stack of books and maps with a wall behind them. There are no windows or people in direct eye sight. Anything worth looking at is either behind me or to the side. Every once and a while, I find myself turned to the left, away from my computer, and just staring outside. Not looking at anything particular, I'm just staring.

I am a visual person. I have an enormous love for music, but I am also partially deaf. Consequently, I have a tendency to remember and relate to things by sight and colors. When I close my eyes and think about work, what I think about is concrete. The roads, the parking lot, the sidewalk, all of them are concrete. In my mind's eye, work is an abyss of gray. There is no color.

Don't get me wrong, my office is not a bad place to work. There are some wonderful people, and many of us have worked together for years. We have a tradition of potlucks on holidays, or any other special occasion we can manufacture as an excuse. The other week, we decided the Leap Year was a reason to celebrate. Years ago someone brought in an old Weber grill for us to have a barbeque, and it's become a staple of our potlucks. The office manager will go buy some meat and I get the pleasure of cooking for everyone. It's one of the reasons I've stayed at this office.

It was a beautiful day on February 29th. I think the temperature was near 70 degrees. There was nary a cloud in the sky at about eleven in the morning. I was sitting outside, next to the grill, staring at the surroundings. Things seemed different. Things did not seem gray. As I sat there, I noticed how many trees there were around me. Some of them are evergreens, probably a type of pine. There were bushes and hedges, and the shade trees had their amazing white blooms on full display. It was quite a picturesque sight to behold. I was mesmerized by it all. I continued to sit there, engrossed by the beauty. It's not that I didn't know all this was there before this day. I just never really looked at it.

There was a smell in the air as well. Have you ever noticed that sunshine has a smell? You might think I'm nuts, but I swear that on some days you can smell the temperature. On really cold days, it seems as if you can smell the frost. On nice sunny days, it smells….well, I'm not sure how to describe it. It just smells sunny. Maybe there's an association between the scent of leaves and flowers with sunshine. That seems like a logical explanation. I don't know. Whatever it is, it smelt sunny that day. It smelt nice.

As I was sitting there, staring at my surroundings, a feeling came over me. I had a sense of peace and relaxation. My whole mindset changed. At that exact moment in time, the way I saw the space around my office was transformed. I saw this little corner of the planet in a totally new light.

The rest of my day was different from the previous weeks. In fact, the next couple of days were different. I did not see gray everywhere. I saw colors. I saw the diverse greens of the leaves and plants. I saw the brilliant white of the blooms on the trees, contrasting with the browns of the trunks and dirt. The next time I drove to work, I observed the skyline of downtown Sacramento in the morning sun. The buildings can be quite interesting. Have you ever noticed the amount of trees in midtown Sacramento? There's a lot of them. They are very attractive.

On Highway 80, there is a point in which the land is slightly elevated and there's a straight shot of the Sierra Nevadas. This time of year they are covered in snow and majestic. You get to witness this view for a number of miles, and it is a nice way to start the day. I really wished I had a camera with me that day. I had a compulsion to pull over and take a picture.
So what is the point of all this?

The point is that nothing around me had actually changed. The concrete on the highways and the parking lot was all still there. The traffic continued to be mind-numbingly miserable. I still worked in the exact same office, with the same faded carpet and drab walls. None of that was different.

What had changed was my perspective.

I started to realize that sometimes I have this same problem with my view of God. I allow myself to grow comfortable with what I perceive as God's nature. I grow comfortable with my relationship to Him and I begin thinking that I've got it all figured out.

Upon reflection, I don't believe I am the only one with this problem. People in general seem to attempt to place God in a fixed position. We relegate God to just certain aspects of life and our beliefs. You may have heard some refer to this as "compartmentalizing" God. We try and take God, the infinite Creator of the Universe, and put Him in a box. This box normally fits in nicely with whatever our predisposed idea of Him might be. For some people, they imprison God to church. Others trap Him only in the Bible or in prayers. He exists only in those places that are convenient in our lives.

This happens with our theology as well. The way we interpret scripture, sin, righteousness, morals, all of it, we interpret based on a singular point of view to which we've grown accustomed. As a result, we see only what is easiest for us to accept. We see only the concrete, we don't see the trees. It's an outlook that fits neatly into a little box, which we can store for later viewing.
This is not done out of sinister motives or evil intentions. We do this because it makes God logical. We do this because we like patterns and routines. We do this because it makes God easy. It is easy to view everything from our predetermined ideas. Some people argue that it is how our brains are wired. The more we recognize patterns, the more efficient our brains operate.

But God is not simple. God is complex.
God is not in a box. God is all around us.
God is not finite. God is infinite.

For some, this might be a disheartening statement. Something that is never-ending and unbounded can be intimidating. Yet, this is the awesomeness of God. Despite this complexity, God has made Himself knowable to His creation. The Apostle Paul tells it very plainly in his letter to the ancient Roman church:

"For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." (Romans 1:20)

How often do we miss seeing God because we chose not to? How often do we miss knowing Him because it's easier to keep the same perspective we've always had?

What I am encouraging here is that you don't become complacent with your idea of God. If you think you already understand Him completely, then you have a very small god. A god not big enough to create, sustain, and love the world.

It is easy to get transfixed by what we already know, and miss out on everything else. We stare at the concrete, thinking the concrete is all there is to God. Then we interpret everything else in our lives by our view of the concrete. All the while, we miss the gloriousness of the trees, the bushes, the hedges, the smell of the sunny days, and all the other wonderful things in life. We miss out on the joy of continuously learning more about God. We miss out because we are too lazy to turn around and look at things from a different vantage point.

So I ask you to be humble enough to turn around and examine what you think you know. Not because you are wrong. But because maybe, just maybe, you are only seeing part of what God wants revealed to you. Don't settle for the gray concrete. Turn around and look for the trees, the plants, the blooms and the dirt all around. Turn around and seek to know God. He's always there. You just have to look. Turn around.