If you’re feeling anxious today—and recent data suggests that about half of you are—Jesus says, look around.
“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (Mt. 6:26)
In the same passage, he says you should “see how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.” (Mt. 6:28-29)
Alongside birds and flowers, the great 18th century American Jonathan Edwards directs you to consider the earthworm “which, when it dies, yields that of which we make such glorious clothing. Christ became a worm for our sakes, and by his death finished that righteousness with which believers are clothed, and thereby procured that we should be clothed with robes of glory.”
You can find God and His truth all around you—in flowers, birds, earthworms, all things visible and invisible. That’s what Paul meant when he wrote that “in him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible...all things have been created through and for him…in him, all things hold together.” (Col. 1:16, 17b) He’s all over the place.
Herman Bavinck added that “the Christian is the person who sees everything in God and God in everything.” So let’s look around and see what we find.
Visible Things
It is striking that—more than ever before—we believe in the doctrines of individualism when, more than ever before, we live surrounded by stuff invented, built, produced, and shipped by others.
Consider the room you’re sitting in right now. Every item around you began as an idea someone had to improve the world. Then the person had the courage to act on it: to design the product, figure out how to build it and consider how to sell it. And here it is.
Or consider the things that lift your spirits after a long week. For me, it’s three pairings: Chips and salsa before a round of tacos al-pastor, a good book in a warm bathtub, and a Lou Malnati’s pizza over good conversation. I can’t make any of those things from scratch—partly because I’m not a good cook, but also because nearly everything that brings us joy is created by someone else, who used Someone Else’s raw materials.
One of the most important Christian theological claims is that the world isn't necessary. God didn't need to create anything—not even us. He was wholly complete in Himself before Genesis 1. And yet He chose to create a world bursting with raw materials: ones we could use to cook pasta, draw paintings, build cathedrals.
Marilynne Robinson identifies this unnecessary abundance by statibng that there is a givenness to things —the world didn't have to exist, and yet here it is, extravagant and unearned. Paul agrees: "Everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving" (1 Tim. 4:4-5).
All these visible gifts point beyond themselves, to an invisible Gift greater than any of them:
“Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ…it is by grace you have been saved… and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.” (Eph. 2:4a-6)
Grace is another word for gift.
Made by grace, saved by grace—all visible things, the gifts of creation, flowing from the same hand that offers salvation. Remember that next time you’re sipping a margarita at your favorite Mexican restaurant.
Invisible Things
Some historians have called the conversation that took place on September 19th, 1931 one of the most important of the twentieth century.
After dinner at Magdalen College, Oxford, three scholars took a walk along Addison's Walk, a secluded trail beside the River Cherwell. They were talking about myths—the old stories, found across every culture, of a hero who sacrifices himself for his people. All three loved these stories. They were debating why.
At some point during that walk, J.R.R. Tolkien—with Hugo Dyson at his side—turned to C.S. Lewis and made an argument Lewis could not shake. The dying-and-rising hero that moved Lewis so deeply in Norse and Greek mythology was not merely a story, Tolkien said. It was a rumor of something real.
Christ is the myth that became fact—the True Story that all other stories were always reaching toward. The ancient myths, Tolkien suggested, are like light passed through a prism: refractions of a single White Light, splintered into the colors we find scattered across the world's legends.
Lewis became a Christian nine days later.
I was eleven years old when I felt what Lewis would later call Joy — the deep longing for a story to be true, for a hero to become fact.
I felt it at the end of The Dark Knight.
Some context: Harvey Dent — Gotham’s White Knight, its great moral prosecutor — is broken by the Joker and turns monstrous. He kills. He kidnaps children. His fall threatens to undo every conviction won in the city's name. After killing Dent, Batman realizes that the city can never know that Dent fell this far.
So Batman makes a choice. He takes the blame. He absorbs Dent’s guilt, shoulders his condemnation, and disappears into the dark. Commissioner Gordon tells his son why they have to hunt him now: “So we’ll hunt him because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A dark knight.”
Batman puts himself in Dent’s place to save the city from Dent’s sins. The White Knight deserves the condemnation but he will get a glorious funeral; the Dark Knight deserves the glory but he will get shamed and despised. This substitutionary atonement saves the city.
I was eleven. I didn't have the word for it yet. But something in me recognized the shape of that story—the innocent standing in for the guilty, the hero punished in the place of those he loved. It didn’t strike me as merely good, but rather it felt deeply true.
The myths that bring us joy, the heroes whose sacrifices move us — these are the splinters of the True Light, written into us by the Mythmaker Himself.
Go Out and See
Lewis later would write that “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—“Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.” God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”
God’s traps are laid everywhere—in objects we didn’t make, in insects we didn’t notice and in stories we’ll never forget. Go out and get trapped by Him.
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