A few days ago, I was out with a friend of mine. We have been friends since elementary school, and even though he moved away by the time my middle school years were upon me, somehow, we kept in touch. We really reconnected about a year or so ago, when he moved back to Kentucky for a while.

We caught up. Not much about this guy had changed, but he is a different sort of dude. I suppose I expected more change than I saw, but my expectations are of no consequence. Everyone progresses at a different rate. Sometimes, it is more difficult for some to grow in their life.

One way that I noticed his growth was in a spiritual sense. It wasn’t something that I noticed his expressing interest before then, not that the subject of angels, heaven, and the typical, hadn’t come up in the past. After all, we were in elementary school back then. But this time, things were a bit different. He had struggled with life issues that made him think a little bit more about the deeper side of things. It was great to see this, especially given how much of a revolution God raised up within me during our time of separation.

Anyways, back to the story from a few days ago—somehow, the subject of his faith journey had come up in conversation. Within this conversation, he mentioned how much he enjoyed camping, and how relaxing it is. There is something about nature that is, well, naturally stimulating yet simultaneously calming, and in a way much different from how we do it within our busy twenty-first centuries lifestyles.

This has prompted me to remember that the writers of the Bible often used agriculture as a way of expressing the growth of an individual. David, in fact, kicked off the fake-book of the Bible (the Psalms, that is — a music book, not a fraudulent one, in case anyone isn’t familiar with the terminology,) with a comparison of “the righteous” to “a tree planted by the rivers of water, which brings for its fruit in its season” (Psalm 1.) In this way, like when we go camping, David takes us right back into the wild, into the way the world was built before we layered things atop it. Does he detail the internal functions of a tree? Psht, no! but by showing how the tree drinks up the water, causing it to flourish and “be fruitful,” he definitely gets his point across.

Is this far from the truth? Hardly! I think it’s dead on. I’ll talk about this more this week—nothing formal, but just a few thoughts about how we can see this lived out.