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Nature speaks about God: Mountains and clouds on Easter

Lynne Baab • Friday March 9 2018

Nature speaks about God: Mountains and clouds on Easter

On my first Easter Sunday as a committed Christian, I sat on a balcony overlooking the Rhone River Valley in Switzerland, listening to a sermon about the resurrection. My back was to the church building, with a window right next to me, so I could hear the sermon. In front of me, the hillside dropped away to the valley floor 2000 feet below me. On the other side of the valley, the seven peaks called Les Dents du Midi rose to an altitude of 10,000 feet.

The preacher was Francis Schaeffer, and the church building was the chapel of the community he founded in Huémoz, Switzerland, called L’Abri. I had arrived for the service fairly early, but the chapel was already full, so I took a seat on the balcony on the valley side of the chapel. I’m so glad I did.

While Francis Schaeffer talked about Jesus’ death and resurrection, I watched clouds rising up the side of the hill. First, I would see a cloud below me. Then it would slowly rise past me and continue to move upward. Then another cloud would appear below me, move past me, and continue up. Over and over the clouds moved up the side of the hill.

The clouds illustrated the sermon and spoke to me of the resurrection of Jesus and his release from the tomb. The clouds spoke to me about the “upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14). I didn’t know the verse in Philippians at that time, but I had a sense of God’s call to me to grow upward, to develop in character, to become the honorable and faithful person God had created me to be.

I had been raised in the church. Throughout junior high and high school, I grew further from God. By the time I was 18, when I left my home in Tacoma, Washington for Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, I was calling myself an atheist. At 19, I went to Avignon, France, to study for a year. For the long All Saints weekend in November, some friends and I travelled to Switzerland.

We stopped by L’Abri Fellowship because one of my friends had a friend who was studying there. We intended to stay only a few hours, but we missed the bus down the mountain and had to stay an extra day. That extra time allowed us to attend a seminar where so many of my questions about the Christian faith were answered.

We returned to Avignon and our studies there. For the rest of the fall, I pondered what I had heard at L’Abri. When I left Avignon to travel to Scandinavia over Christmas vacation, I was still not a Christian. When I returned to Avignon two weeks later, I knew I was a Christian. I don’t know exactly when or how it happened, but I knew a giant shift had occurred in me.

I wrote to the people at L’Abri, asking if I could come and study there for the two weeks of my Easter break, and they said yes.

During my time at L’Abri, as I walked from one chalet to the other, going from the place I stayed to the places they assigned me to work, and then to my study carrel, the mountains spoke to me over and over. They spoke to me of God’s grandeur, majesty and sheer beauty.

Easter Day was the icing on the cake, with those clouds moving up the side of the hill, like a vivid metaphor for the very act we were celebrating at Easter.

I wrote last week about the way God spoke to me through Mount Rainier when I was 15, saying there’s more, there’s something holy and beautiful beyond this life. God’s message to me on the side of that steep hill in Switzerland was focused more clearly on God as known in the Bible: Jesus, his resurrection, and the holy, beautiful and majestic God who created mountains, valleys and clouds.

I want to ask the same questions I asked last week: What specific places in nature have spoken to you? What have those places said?

And I’ll ask an additional question: In what ways do you think God’s voice to you through nature is informed by what you know about God from the Bible?

(Next week: Algae. Illustration: Huémoz, Switzerland by Dave Baab. If you’d like to receive an email when I post on this blog, sign up under “Subscribe” in the right hand column.)

Bible study focus: My Bible study guide, Prayers of the Old Testament, just went into its fifth printing. It presents study/reflection/discussion questions about eight specific prayers in the Old Testament, with the goal of deepening our prayers. To learn more, click here.



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