Hope for the Human Race — Mitch Teemley

Dear fellow travelers,

Sundays here are now “Sunday Share.”  The post below is a perfect complement to yesterday’s post on widows and orphans.  Sometimes they aren’t literally widows and orphans, and sometimes if we’re caring and creative, we can visit them in amazing ways.  Check out the slideshow – it’s very inspiring!

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” – James 1:17

Last week I posted a snarky photoblog entitled No Hope for the Human Race! but promised a counter-blog this week. Here it is. In the world of rhetoric, anecdotes are not considered sufficiently pursuasive to prove a point — unless there are enough to show a trend. Is there hope for the human race? Hard […]

Hope for the Human Race — Mitch Teemley

Will Green Be Greener in Paradise?

Psalm 98:7 declares: “Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who dwell in it!” In Romans 8:19 Paul adds that “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.”

Pastor James Montgomery Boice connects these ideas and says, “The world will one day be renewed.”  Nature already shows God’s glory, but it also, like mankind, is not yet as it shall be.  Boice adds: “I think of the way C.S. Lewis developed this idea in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In the first section of that book, when Narnia was under the power of the wicked Witch of the North, the land was in a state of perpetual winter. Spring never came. But when Aslan rose from the dead, the ice began to melt, flowers bloomed, and the trees turned green.”[1] Creation shares the hope of mankind – regeneration in a future paradise at the coming of its Lord!

Even now, we get an occasional glimpse of nature that’s somehow better than what we’re used to, and perhaps it is a glimpse of the paradise beyond the renewal of all things.  We were recently in Wales, on Mount Snowdon and a nearby trail in Llanberis, and below are some pictures from that day.  Some of these show the many brilliant shades of green, which seemed more glorious than the greens near our home in the U.S. We don’t often see rocks interact with the greenery like this here.

So, will paradise be even greener than this?  Will it seem like a perpetual winter has finally lifted?  I’m eagerly waiting to find out someday. In the meantime, enjoy these:


[1] From “April 19.” James Montgomery Boice and Marion Clark. Come to the Waters: Daily Bible Devotions for Spiritual Refreshment.  (2017).