This appears to be a strange question. You might answer, I see a leaf of Romaine lettuce, and of course you would be right, but you would also be wrong. Am I contradicting myself? No. The leaf, as with all created things, points beyond itself. So yes, the leaf is a leaf, but it is also an amazing creation of Almighty God! If we don’t see all of reality this way, we are not seeing reality biblically, and have been sucked into the vortex of the stultifying secular culture we swim in every day. I’m not sure there is anything more important as we raise our kids, or develop our own faith, than learning to see reality biblically. That means we daily, hourly, minutely, constantly affirm God as Creator, of everything! That means we stop taking those things for granted, and have moments of wonder at the sheer bizarreness of existence. As I did with my Romaine leaf.
This post was inspired by a lunch I was making for myself. Washing the Romaine leaf in the sink as I was preparing to make a sandwich, all of a sudden . . . . I was blown away! I looked at the leaf, the deep greenness, the texture, the feel, and I thought to myself, this thing I’m washing came out of the ground? Are you kidding me? How? Why? That’s insane! It even nourishes my body! Of course, sadly, it’s something we take for granted and rarely think about because the secular culture we daily swim in programs us to see Romaine lettuce leaves as “natural.” What does that even mean! Well, something like, you put some seed in dirt, get some water and sun, and abracadabra, up comes Romaine! As natural as natural can be! Happens all by itself. The implication, drummed into us in the culture from our earliest age? No God required!
It’s shocking how we, as Christians, so easily fall into becoming practical naturalists; all of us. C. S. Lewis, who else, shocked me into this realization when he brought up the virgin birth (conception) in a similar context. He said that Mary’s virgin birth is no more miraculous than any birth (conception). Yes, it’s not the way conception normally happens, but the supernatural creative power of Almighty God is just as necessary for one as the other. I’ll confess I had tended to see normal conception and childbirth as in a sense “natural,” but there is nothing “natural” about it! When my daughter was born, as I saw her come out of my wife, all I could think was, “There is a God!” There was nothing “natural” about it. Birth, every birth, is a miracle. As is all of life.
Thus births, and Romaine leafs, and every single thing, should always, at all times, cause us to proclaim, “There is a God!” It is difficult to convey with mere words how important this is for maintaining a robust faith in a secular culture that suffocates us with its naturalist assumptions at every turn. The secularism we encounter everywhere, media (including advertising), education, entertainment, etc., programs and indoctrinates us into naturalism (matter is all that matters). It takes a concerted effort on our part to counter the daily onslaught. If we are not careful and diligent, we’ll think that births and Romaine lettuce leaves are “natural,” that such things just are, and really don’t need God to exist.
Of course as Christians we would never say such a thing, but we’re easily lulled into thinking that way. To counter the lull, experiencing reality for us, and our children, should be constant doxology, an outpouring of praise to our unfathomable Almighty Creator God. How could it not be! I used a variation of the word bizarre above. One definition is, “strikingly out of the ordinary.” In a secular age we need to learn how to see life this way, and teach it to our children. Nothing is ordinary, not one single thing. Including a simple Romaine lettuce leaf.
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