Plantinga opens the chapter talking about the book A Separate Peace; the character Gene Forrester talks about how he wanted to "break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because those mornings were too full of beauty for me." I can admit that I have these experiences ALL the time. I'm a very dramatic and passionate person-especially when it comes to God's creation. When I go hiking in the North Cascades back home in WA, I cannot contain my excitement over the beauty of the mountains and the meadows and the view of the San Juan Islands!! Sometimes I literally throw up my arms and scream out of happiness. I have a similar experience when I listen to certain music-particularly the Shostakovich String Quartet no. 8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjvTTfbpWjY)-since I am a violinist and avid listener of classical music; certain pieces of music make me start rocking out-which probably seems weird to most people. I definitely have experienced this uncontainable joy.
Plantinga goes on to describe how we often long to "get back" or "get in" those present or past experiences but explains how nature and music cannot "open her arms to receive us." There is something in us that always wants more; and these things that make us so joy-filled are wonderful-but not final. "Nothing in earth can finally satisfy us," Plantinga states, because our final joy lies, and he quotes Tolkien, "beyond the walls of the world." Augustine suggests that the reason we can never be filled on this earth is because God "has made us for himself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."
This part was a bit hard to read because, as a human being, I want the world to fulfill the desires of my heart and often times I am so focused on my role here on earth that I forget about heaven and the wonders-beyond imagination-that it holds. This being a book by a Calvin college professor, Plantinga of course brings in the idea from John Calvin of sensus divinitatus, or "sense of divinity;" the idea that humans always have a sense of God that "runs in us like a stream, even though we divert it toward other objects." When I'm in my WA mountains, I often feel this sense (it is different for me however, since I already have faith and a relationship with God) that goes like "how can anyone NOT believe in a Creator after seeing beauty like this?!" or in one of my biology classes, learning about the complexity of cells, DNA, and enzymes such as phosphofructokinase (I just wanted to drop that word) that are so specific and essential to the function of our human body as a whole-"how could all of this be a result of chance?"
College is a time to grow and discover those things that excite us and eventually develop into passions. It is our responsibility as Christians to turn those passions into actions. I have begun to see, particularly last semester, those things for which God has instilled in me a hope-a combination of faith and desire-which have/are developing into deep passions. These passions all point to some sort of justice I want in the world; for me particularly-conservation of the earth, which I believe starts with educating people about the land on which they dwell and the problems that are destroying it. If people know the land and experienced it (as I have, hiking in the mountains, and exploring tide pools) they will come to love if. If they only knew the complex relationships of everything in the environment, they would see how little things they do percolate throughout the food chain or the water cycle (etc) and would start to think about this planet that God has allowed us to live on and how he wants us to treat it. This is the way I want to be an "agent of shalom."
