Yesterday was wet. Just wet. Wonderfully so. We got a little actual rain, but most of the day was just heavy mist, and we basically were inside a cloud. We couldn’t see the highway down past the hayfield, and the tops of trees were obscured, and the drops settled, all silvery, on everything. It almost looked like frost, everything was so spangled.

Spiderwebs and blades of grass, mundane on other days but be-jeweled in the mist, drops of water hanging like jewels on the fine threads of the spiderwebs. Roses and rosebuds, and spiderwort, gathering the mist, holding it on leaves and petals and stamens. And then, if you looked closely enough, the whole world reflected upside down in the drops of water, the sky, the flowers, the grass. It was dazzling.

Right now, our society is weighed down with all sorts of mental ills, and the self-care “movement,” if you will, is thriving…It would appear that the best solution anyone can suggest for the chronic anxieties and depressions and just generally not getting along well with life is that people need to love themselves more. For as long as the self-care solution has been being promoted, it is obvious that that isn’t the problem. We don’t have a problem with people not loving themselves enough. The problem is that we as human creatures are tuned to love ourselves, and to love ourselves too much. We don’t need encouragement in that vein.

We need, rather, encouragement to look up from all of our – in the big scheme of things – petty problems and look to the Creator God who loves us. Sometimes we find reminders of that in the tiniest, most mundane yet spectacular ways. Like taking a walk in a cloud. Gazing on the littlest, least-important things that God clearly cares deeply about. And then realizing that if He cares about the flowers of the field, the birds of the air, the mists on the meadows, He must care that much more about His human creatures.