‘People are... difficult to live with and bothersome’

I have been watching videos by Cecilia Blomdahl, a woman who lives on Svalbard, a Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle. I love them, and it seems I’m not alone in that – she has 1.12 million subscribers.

The island is beautiful, and Cecilia makes beautiful videos. Just today I watched her go with her boyfriend to their off-grid cabin, which is in a remote part of the island, surrounded only by snow and water and mountains. It’s simply idyllic.

We love nature, and rightly so. God has made a beautiful world. So I was not surprised to read this week that efforts to rewild Britain are gathering momentum, and public support is growing for government schemes aiming to increase biodiversity, reintroduce lost wildlife and regenerate wild places such as wetlands. Woodlands are being encouraged to grow, trees are being planted. Ecosystems are being rebuilt.

We love such places, and we want to enjoy them. I struggle not to envy Cecilia with her lovely cabin, the boat she has to take her there, the time to enjoy weeks at a stretch out in the wilderness.

Because such enjoyment comes at a cost. Maybe the cost is the necessity to keep making videos of your life, with all the work that goes into producing and editing and sharing your life with over a million people. Maybe it’s just the cost of having to spend a lot of money. Many of the world’s most beautiful places can only be enjoyed by the wealthy. And many of them are very restricted – for it’s people who are destructive. If we want wilderness places to regrow, governments have to keep people out of them.

And so most of us live in the cities and towns. For Christians, there’s a clear advantage for doing so. The places where people are, are the places where ministry is needed. It’s people who need the gospel. It’s people who need encouraging. It’s where we find the other Christians, the other members of our family, the ones we are to meet with and love and serve. And of course, for any person, having other people around allows for all kinds of business and cooperation and all the things that make society function. Yes, there are people even in the wilderness who need the gospel, but there are more of them in the cities. Cities are good. The Bible begins with people in a garden, but it ends with people in a city.

But people are hard. They are difficult to live with and bothersome. The idea of being alone in the wilderness is partly attractive precisely because of the privacy it offers. And cities also tend to be loud, and polluted, and rather ugly. They could be otherwise, of course, and there are certainly groups who campaign for more beautiful buildings and streets and better organisation and all those things that would make living in a city nicer. There are ways of bringing nature into the cities and making life there more enjoyable. But they won’t ever fully succeed. Because people are greedy. People are sinful, and grasping, and won’t cooperate. That’s the world we live in.

There will come a time when we do not have to choose between people and comfort, or people and beauty, or people and an idyllic life. There will be a world where other people are always a joy and delight as we worship God together. But this world, for all its beauty, is the place where we are still waiting for that. We wait, because right now there are other priorities besides the enjoyment of nature.

And so I remind myself as I look at lovely videos of nature, that right now God is holding back judgment because He wants people to know and love Him. It is good for that reason to live where other people are. It is good to make it a priority to serve others in whatever ways we can, because that’s God’s programme. That’s what He wants us to do in His world right now.