Prodigal Praise

DAILY BYTE

As we conclude this week’s devotions, I’d like to share a recent personal experience where slowing down and becoming more attuned to God’s presence brought an experience of deep gratitude and joy.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the Botanical Gardens in the midst of a massive wind storm that swept through Durban. It was exhilarating. This incredibly powerful wind suddenly gusting with full voice, then fading momentarily to a mere murmur, before bellowing forth unashamedly once more. As I sat there listening attentively to all this, conscious of God’s majestic presence, I suddenly realized that the very trees around and above me were singing.

I could hear unmistakable percussive sounds marking out a rhythmic beat. There were lilting harmonies, great guttural expulsions of noise, sudden startling crashes (which were branches falling around me), and gentle whisperings. As the tree above me caught the wind it would swell into a deep resonant baritone, and then wait while other trees nearby answered back. It was a great chorus of voices, more than I could count, making magnificent music together.

At times it sounded like the ebb and flow of the ocean. At times it was like the gurgling of a mountain stream. At times I could hear what sounded like thunder, or maybe the galloping of wild horses, and hidden almost imperceptibly in this great cacophony, in the rustling of the trees was the sound of birds singing.

One biblical scholar has suggested that God sang creation into being, declaring that it was very good. If that is true, then what I heard that day sounded like a little piece of creation singing back joyously, ‘Yes. It is very good indeed.’

Of course, it’s not just the trees in the Durban Botanical Gardens on a windy day that sing out in beauty and love. Everything with the breath of life within it seems peculiarly shaped to be an instrument of praise.

The biologist Lewis Thomas tells us that termites make percussive sounds that play a significant part in their social cohesion. The trumpeting of elephants is certainly not just a figure of speech. Right now, massive humpback whales are singing long and complex and beautiful songs under the ocean that can be heard for hundreds of kilometers all around. And even in the most distant reaches of the universe, the scientists tell us, stars are bursting into existence, releasing radio waves and other forms of multi-frequency energy that if we could hear, would fill our ears with every conceivable note and tone. When the scriptures speak of the morning stars singing together, maybe it’s not just beautiful poetry. Maybe it’s expressing what God actually hears.

The point of all this is that we live in a world where the praises of God are already being offered in glorious and exuberant profusion. We live in a world of prodigal praise. Indeed, the prodigal praise of all creation points us to our life’s deepest purpose, that we too have been created to praise. All around us there is a cadence of grace, enfolding us and holding us. Which means that the reorienting of our lives towards God is never any further away than a single breath, if we allow that breath to join in the worship of God that constantly rises all around us.

By slowing down, listening, looking, we come to experience things of God that we otherwise would simply miss. It’s the simple invitation of grace that lies open and accessible to us all – in every moment of every day in every place.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Lord, I was made to be an instrument of worship that would resound with prodigal praise to the glory of your name. Help me to rest more in you, and so allow your hands to hold me and play me, that my very life would add to the magnificent music of creation that echoes all around. Amen.

SCRIPTURE READING

Psalm 146:1-2

Praise the Lord, O my soul.
I will praise the Lord all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.