For Wilshire Baptist Church
Sunday afternoon we walked on the Spring Creek Trail in Garland to soak up the sunshine and stretch our legs after a week of cold, wet weather. It’s not a rugged or strenuous walk by any measure, although there is a short segment that is unpaved and provides a sense of not being in the city when in fact you’re surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people. In this place, it’s possible to see both the perfect beauty of nature and the ugliness of people.
We walk the trail throughout the year and witness the beauty of nature as the seasons change: leaves turning in the fall, wildflowers in the spring. On this early March afternoon we saw trout lilies, which are tiny little white or yellow flowers that bloom up out of clusters of broad leaves that are speckled like trout, thus the name. The flowers are shaped like honey suckle but they hang their heads downward. We first read about them recently in an announcement for a guided trail walk that we were unable to attend. We weren’t looking for them Sunday but then we came upon them and were pleased to finally see them.
We usually see the ugliness of people in the form of litter that is tossed along the trail or washed through by the creek nearby. But Sunday we were walking on the broad paved portion of the trail and saw first one and then dozens of shiny gold copper BBs. I started to pick them up but quit because there were so many. I call them BBs, but more accurately they were copper coated shotgun pellets. I say this because I grew up with a BB gun and you don’t scatter the BBs over such a large area unless you’re completely careless when loading your gun. I believe what we saw was the result of what happens when someone fires a shotgun straight up into the air and the pellets come raining back down to the ground.
Random gunfire is an ongoing problem in Garland, especially on New Year’s Eve and July Fourth. City officials call it “celebratory gunfire,” and they’ve tried to outlaw it because it’s dangerous; what goes up will come down, after all. Police and citizens like us who live near our large city parks put out signs twice a year warning about fines and jail sentences if you’re caught firing guns, but our efforts seem to have little impact.
I’m not anti-weapon — I still have my childhood BB gun out in the garage — but it’s one thing to be out in the country on private property hunting or shooting at cans and bottles for sport, and another to be shooting them in the heart of the city and risking hurting someone. What’s worse, it may be just a small step from pointing a gun at the sky to pointing it at another human being.
I believe the God that created the impossibly intricate trout lily is the same God who placed in humans the creativity to turn natural elements into compounds that can propel cars and rockets, and yes, even copper pellets. What I don’t understand is how we can be in awe of nature on the one hand and so careless and cruel with it on the other. Watching some of the news reports about the war in Ukraine, I’ve been horrified by how rockets have just been heaved into the hearts of modern cities. I’ve thought about what that would be like in Dallas — to have missiles exploding in the midst of Uptown, Lakewood, or the Dallas Arboretum with its tulips and azaleas and even trout lilies.
Surely, the God who created this beautiful world wants better for us and expects better from us than what is happening in Ukraine or the streets of Dallas or the hidden trails of Garland. It should be us – and not the trout lilies – that are hanging our heads in shame.