“Don’t miss the forest for the trees” applies to me and my occasional incursions in scenic areas to do landscape photography. While on a commissioned assignment to create some images in Unicoi county, I was picking my way through shrubs and low trees on Horseback Ridge. This rocky outcrop follows a ridgeline for hundreds of yards with many vistas dotting the jagged terrain.
This ridge must take a weathering because most of what grows on it is scrubby and short. So while I waited for the perfect sunset moment, I looked closely at just what those scrubby plants were. Blueberries—the wild food of bears and birds? I looked up and down the ridge and they were everywhere. How unobservant of me! I’ve seen these bushes on my treks for years, and I didn’t realize they were blueberries!
I had to marvel at the plant. Not only were the berries colorful, a kind of purple-blue when ripe, a bold pink when maturing, the turning leaves had strong red and orange tones. So here I am again, thinking about how beautiful something is that didn’t have to be beautiful at all. If the blueberry bush was mundane, and it bore a dull and gray fruit, what difference would it make?
Yet the blueberry is a gorgeous, wild fruit. Indians used them for medicines, teas, dyes, and, of course, food. More and more we hear today how healthy blueberries are—full of vitamin C, antioxidants, low in fat and a good source of fiber.
So why isn’t the blueberry bush mundane? For that matter, why are little, iridescent tropical fish so richly colored? Why is our natural world so perfectly and intensely hued? Why, indeed?
Scenes like these affirm a rational conclusion that there is a God, a wise God, an artistic God. He created this vast world with plants that bear fruits, vegetables, and other edibles that benefit the health of both people and animals. He endowed our world with aesthetic wonder, manifested even in little blue berries that cling to windswept shrubs for us to see.
Perhaps the next time you chew on a warm, delicious slice of blueberry pie, you can chew on the thought that God is clearly loving. For to bless all his creation with so much to arouse each of your five senses while providing the stupefying array of foods for you to eat is beyond accidental benevolence. No, God is clearly intentional in all His created work, and He was intentional in His creation of you.
