I was so excited when I found this picture for yesterday’s Catch that I needed an excuse to post it again so I could write about it. It’s such a grand statement of the natural cathedral of God’s creation. No church building can top this – the trees standing like giants with their arms up in continual praise, and the man, seemingly oblivious to it all, walking his dog along the path, his way shrouded in fog. He may not even be able to see the natural sweep of the branches we can see from the camera’s eye.

Is the man praising God as we are when we see this picture? Is his eye swept upward to where the branches go?

Praise is not something we are told to do as much as it is something we are expected to do. It is assumed that if we live and breathe, we will recognize our being in God. Paul addressed the intellectuals and philosophers in Athens with this assumption when he wrote: “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And He is not served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He himself gives all men life and breath and everything else … ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’” (Acts 17:24-28)

If we are His offspring, then we praise Him for no other reason than He is our creator. Quite simply, the truth about our relationship requires it. When we praise, we are merely – and in some cases, finally – fitting into things as they really are. We are not adding anything to our life or to God when we praise Him as much as we are aligning ourselves correctly with the universe and our place in it.

Imagine the man in this picture echoing the trees with his arms up and you get a physical picture of where our souls should be all the time. In Him the man in this picture lives and moves and has his being. He may or may not be aware of it in the moment, but there is no doubt that the trees get it. The dog too.