Landslides

I've been walking a bit of the south west coast path - the weather has been on the whole, glorious - maybe too hot and sunny at times for walking, but I carried on anyway..... I'm now tired, peeling a bit from unexpected sunburn, and processing all I have experienced. 

There was a point on the walk that I wasn't paying attention and followed the path that would have taken me down the cliff rather than across it, because, as often happens along that coast, there had been a landslide. Thankfully I realised my mistake before getting to the edge and I adjusted my walk to the path diversion, one of many path diversions on my route. 

When you see the change caused by the landslides, you can't help but wonder what it would have been like before. The cliffs were bigger, the plants holding on in different way, the rocks sitting in different places, the beach easier to walk along perhaps. How far was the path away from the cliff edge before the landslide and where did it go? 

Regular landslides have been changing the coastline since the coastline was formed. It's part of the make up of the Jurassic coast. It's one of the reasons why those are are interested keep on finding fossils that tell the stories of millions of years ago. It's in the landslides that new and old beautiful things are found and the might and strength of the earth proclaims the might and strength of God. 

And the beauty of what is left, the changes and the things that have survived the landslides, mingling together, that is what brings about a sense of wonder and awe....

The word 'beauty' continues to sing to me as I keep on walking in this time of pause. 

Over the last week or so I have been continuing to reflect on the beauty around, on the things that God has created and I've also been challenged to find beauty in the continuously changing situations we are living in and in my questioning and worn out self. 

I've had the song 'Beautiful Things' by Gungor in me head for most of the last week or so. He sings this:

All this pain
I wonder if I'll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change, at all
All this earth
Could all that is lost ever be found?
Could a garden come out from this ground, at all?

As we consider how everything has shifted in the last few years, and how it is continuing to shift, there is no doubt that we are grieving and many of us are in pain and we have questions. When fault lines develop in the earth that holds us,  that rock us and our way of being to our very core - when these fault lines cause landslides to happen that change the landscape around - it's difficult to see how we might find our way out of places that are not particularly beautiful. 

But, if the landslides of the Jurassic Coast can teach us anything is that even though there are landslides, there is still beauty to be found. We might need to wait for the ground to settle, for the new roots to be established, for the old stuff that is still there to find a new way into the light, but beauty will be found. We might need to hold the brokenness of the fault lines for a while, but what is lost and needs to be found will be discovered, and a new garden will grow. 

After the chorus, the song goes on:

All around,
Hope is springing up from this old ground
Out of chaos life is being found, in you

The nature of a landslide is chaos. Where mathematical models can predict how it will fall, they can't fully tell where it will end up - a slight shift, a crack opening up in a previously thought to be strong place, can change it's size and direction completely. A tiny little stone added into the mix, a bird flying too close, a tree falling on the cliffs above, a wave in the sea below hitting a branch washed up three days ago can change everything. The landslide finds its own path before it settles. Yet in that landslide, there is hope of new beauty being revealed - new beauty already being found in the path of the earth as it falls. 

There is still a huge amount to be hopeful for, even amongst the chaos around (not despite it - we mustn't forget that there is beauty even in chaos - that's one of the reasons the cliffs aren't strengthened to stop the landslides from happening - because the earth - God's earth - knows what it is doing, even if we do not). We see hope in the continued fight for justice, we see hope in the way that people love others, we see hope in the arrival of new life and in the voices that are like stars shining in the night sky that are punching holes in the darkness. We see hope in the plants that survived the fall, and the seeds scattered to grow in places they never belonged before. We see hope in the promise that Jesus makes when he promises life in all its fulness in John 10:10 and then in Revelation 21:5 where he says "Behold, I am making all things new". 

The chorus and bridge say this:

Oh, you make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

You make me new,
You are making me new...

In the dust, in the settling landslide, in the faults of the earth that have diverted the path; in the waiting, in the confusion over the way ahead, in mine and your worries over our identity and place in it all.... in us.... there is a beauty already formed in the mind and hands of God, ready to be discovered.

May you know beauty both on the steady path and in the landslide

May you find beauty in however the earth settles

May you know that beauty that God sees in you

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I took a huge amount of photos whilst I was walking. I've put them in a video (a very rough and ready video - you'd think I'd be better at this after 2+ years of 'video maker and editor' as an unexpected part of my job description) with the song 'Beautiful Things' as the backing track, if you want to have a look at what caught my eye and hear the song, here it (apologetically) is: