An Invitation

 The Jan and Fred Baldwin people had a great tribal gathering in Gulf Shores in August 2026.  We danced, sang, told stories old and new, remembered our matriarch, Jan, and generally acted the fool!  It was wonderful and exhausting.

I never imagined that our family would enjoy the bounty of the unifying Kingdom of God welding us into one unit.  How could a human like me be a part of such a family!?

We were there for eight days.  I was away from home for 12 days, taking three days for a road trip down the west side of Alabama, with a two-day return trip up the east side.

Most evenings we put supper together and stayed in.  On three nights we caravaned to a restaurant.  We had agreed to go out only one night, but then the reality of creating a meal and cleaning up the mess was not in the spirit of “vacationing.”

While waiting for a table at a seafood restaurant (one that shall remain unnamed because the food was so-so and the noise was painful), I took a solo walk to the beach.  I found a park bench and watched the last of the sunset melt into midnight blue.

Before the photo-perfect golden hour light had faded, a woman approached me asking me to take a picture of her and her husband.  I was glad to do so.  She was quite sociable.  He just smiled a lot.  They had driven from New York.  I told them of my trip down from Nashville.  Her name was Veronica, and his was Nick.  Veronica was a great conversationalist; Nick was a good listener.

She wanted to move to the Gulf Coast.  He wanted a cabin in the mountains.  That part of our conversation led me to refer to Jan’s love for the ocean.  In turn, that led to talking about Jan’s glorious battle with cancer and death, which then gave me an opportunity to tell my Kingdom of God story.

In response, Veronica told me how close to God she felt in the grandeur of His creation.  She grew up Catholic but had lost interest in “religion,” preferring the “trees, grass, water, sky ….”

I have often heard, especially from hunters, that they prefer to be out in the woods, close to God, rather than in a church building surrounded by people.  There have been seasons in my career where I wished to do the same.  I remember a Peanuts strip where Linus and Charlie Brown were contemplating reality.  In the last frame, Linus, with blanket in hand, leaning on a low wall, mused, “I love humanity.  It’s people I don’t like.”

The beauty of all Creation is more than a display for our enjoyment.  God’s Creation is an invitation to come to Him.  The temptation is to become so enamored with the invitation that we fail to show up for the event we are invited to.

Surrounding ourselves with the Creator’s beauty can provide us with a false sense of assurance that God understands our feelings and adjusts His expectations for us.  He knows we are turning our backs on His contentious, self-righteous people so that we can have a purer, unrestricted walk with Him.

Those who choose to worship in nature miss the point of nature!  All of nature is there to demonstrate the wonder of our Creator.  His creation, that we delight in, is there solely to draw us to Him, His purposes, and His ways.  That tree you admire so much, that flower, that bird and its song: those marvelous creations are his delicious invitation to enrapture ourselves in Himself — His being, His presence.]  That means Nature is His formal invitation to worship Him.

As with any invitation, they are nice to get, but arriving at the event is better.  Yes, the church is full of people God is having problems with, but that doesn’t stop Him from showing up.  AND, your attitude toward loving Him  just might be the problem He is most concerned with.  He longs to have you join the voices who sing of His mysterious and wonderful ways.  Don’t let the people dissuade you from His Person.

God does not “need” you.  But He does deeply desire you to show up with the rest of the reprobates.  His love compels Him to invite you.  Our love compels us to show up.  Our desire to show up is directly correlated to the intensity of our love for Him.

For ever since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through His workmanship [all His creation, the wonderful things that He has made], so that they [who fail to believe and trust in Him] are without excuse and without defense. (Romans 1:20, Amplified Bible)

Photo – Taken at Pay Lake in Partridge, KY.