Good to walk through the clearance this morning. It was wet and gloomy with low cloud. About quarter to nine a bit of pannus just above the dam wall started to break up and blow away. In a couple of minutes the rain was less, it was looking brighter and the edge of the valley was visible for the first time. The cloud was just about hanging on in the trees. A few more minutes, no rain and bits of blue sky, which before long was entirely blue. Happy walking.
So it’s kind of appropriate that Sunday’s lectionary Psalm is 19, “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” I believe that Psalm is appropriate in every weather too. I don’t like the rain as much or fog, or wind or ice as much as I used to, but they too are about the glory of God.
And that goes for the landscape as well. There’s no bit of the world I look at that’s unaffected by the human race – quarries, managed moorlands, green fields, reservoirs, roads, paths – but God has given us the inventiveness and abilities to work with our planet. We mess it up at our peril.