Pastor and author Eugene Peterson notes that it's easy for us to look at the grandeur and beauty of the mountains or to bask in the warmth of the spring sun and recognize the beauty of creation. Yet, sometimes we ignore the people right in front of us. Peterson writes,

Several years ago one of my students who lived a distance away and rode a crowded bus to the college each day said to his wife as he went out the door one morning, "I'm just going to go out and immerse myself in God's creation today." The next day his parting words were the same. On the third day, she called him back, "Don't you think you ought to go to class today? A couple of days walking in the woods or on the beach is okay, but don't you think enough is enough?"

He said, "Oh, I've been going to class every day."

"Then what," she said, "is all this business about immersing yourself in creation?"

"Well, I spend forty minutes on the bus each morning and afternoon. Can you think of a setting more thick with creation than that—all these people created, created in the image of God, created male and female?"

"I never thought of that," she said.

Peterson concludes, "[We need to embrace] the people around us with the same delight as we do the hawks soaring above us and the violets blooming at our feet. Men and women, children and the elderly, the beautiful and the plain, the blind and the deaf, amputees and paralytics, the mentally impaired and the emotionally distraught—each a significant and sacred detail of nature, of God's creation."