Just not good enough

"For anyone stepped in an understanding of God as Creator, love and respect should surely be a natural characteristic. If we understand all matter as God-breathed, we will not merely view it as a vehicle for an idea, or an inconvenient, transitory 'veil' to be broken through and discarded.
We will understand that genius lies in seeing 'the general in the particular' and learn 'to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in the wild flower' . Brand & Chaplin - Art & Soul.

It's something you seem to do more as you get older (or, at least become more aware of yourself doing it..!): musing on the nature, the value and the interplay of things which surround us and which so perfectly weave into the fabric of our lives.
During the almost unceasing gray that proved to be our summer this year, there was a single day where I found myself having the opportunity to facilitate a shoot for another photographer on a beach where my late wife and I shared many rich times.
The day arrived, and whilst the shoot progressed further down the shore, I took the opportunity to relish a day of bright skies in oh so familiar and friendly surroundings. It genuinely felt, as I clambered, swam and played, that I had come home, that friends I had taken there, and Kay herself, would appear at any moment and we'd have a picnic on the beach.
That, in essence, is what inherently defines our creation - a richness of life that delights God and thereby saturates a moment with significance.

That is why all the alternative definitions of who and what we are cannot satisfy.
They are essentially devoid of what really counts - an everlasting reality where life is infused with a deep and satisfying richness and significance that never fades, never falters, never ends.

Everything which surrounds us contains within it a reality, however currently tainted by human folly, that 'hints' and glints, like some flash into something astonishing in a fairy tale, that life here is good - very good, and that if we listen hard enough, we can catch a few notes of the song which tells us the day is not far off when that truth will pervade all of creation...

"We want", noted Lewis, "something else which can hardly put into words - to truly be united to the beauty we can see... to bathe in it...Someday, we will put on that glory of which nature as now seen is but the first sketch".
That, as echoed in that first day of refreshment at the end of the creation week, is exactly what will be elemental to a realm which will glorify God forever - the hope now ours, in Jesus Christ.