“It’s Not All Up to You”
Alumni Q&A with Forestry Manager Greg Snyder

Greg Snyder took a winter stream ecology class at Au Sable in January, 1993 as part of his biology major at Calvin University. He is currently the Assistant Regional Manager for the Minnesota DNR Division of Forestry. He shares some of his vocational journey and the theology and spiritual practices that sustain his work.

What do you remember about Au Sable?

We had some pretty memorable field trips where there were a couple feet of snow stacked on the banks of the river. We were putting on waders and going into the stream with nets and other sampling equipment to collect aquatic insects in the river. I remember pulling a handful of insects off of one of the sampling screens. I saw all these critters moving around in my hand, and they started freezing because of the air temperature was colder than the water temperature.

I also remember going to Vespers services. I was learning a lot of new things about the insect and fish life in the trout streams. It was overwhelming to see all the complexity of life. That there was a group of people acknowledging God as creator of this mysterious life, almost unknowable in its beauty and complexity, made a big impact on me. Science is about repeatable experiments and looking at observable behavior. But this was encountering a different type of truth, a different way of understanding reality.

Tell us about your career path.

As soon as I graduated high school, I started working at a residential environmental education center called the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, doing janitorial work and helping with classes. I was hired there full time after I graduated from Calvin. After working there about three years, I went back to graduate school at University of Tennessee, where I got a masters degree in forestry.

Since that time, I’ve been working in the field of public land and forest management in Minnesota.

Why forestry?

When I was young I started being interested in plant life. My dad would teach me the names of the trees in the woods. At Calvin I took a plant taxonomy course and learned all the ways they were classified, from leaf structures to seeds. When I was at Tremont, I read a book about different plant communities in the forest. I remember having questions and starting to read more about the assemblages of different species that would grow and interact with each other. So I had a long-standing interest in forest management.

What are the challenges and highlights of your current work?

I work for a state agency, and there is a lot of bureaucratic process. That has its upsides and downsides. There are a lot of resources available to me to do my work, but sometimes things don’t move very quickly as there are a lot of people involved in each decision.

My current job is in middle management. I have supervisory responsibility for regional specialists who work in different areas of forest management, including wildfire suppression, insects and diseases, inventory, harvest and reforestation, and long-term planning. My work these days is a lot of people work and communications. It’s not real flashy or high-profile work. It’s a stewarding of resources over the long haul.

How do you understand your work and faith integrating?

I was raised in a Christian home and had parents, especially my dad, who were interested in creation care and leaving things better than they found them. With forest management, the soils and the community of plants that develop on it over time is an extremely complex, mysterious orchestra. I was taught that the Lord is behind that. That’s been reinforced through interacting with other believers who continue to reiterate that.

It’s also in the scripture. For example, Psalm 65 describes the Lord showering the earth with rain and softening the furrows of the plowed land. Different scriptural imagery testifies to the truth of God as creator. Then of course there are the promises we have in Christ. Paul talks about the earth groaning, but the kingdom has arrived in Christ. It’s here, but not fully here. There will be a fulfillment and restoration of creation.

One particular voice I’ve been reading over the last few years is Martin Luther. I have been impressed with Luther’s theology of living by faith. It’s easy for anybody that has an impulse to take care of creation to get sidetracked and overwhelmed by thinking that we have to somehow pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and do a bunch of stuff for God. We need to get back to the testimony of scripture that God is the giver of good gifts. Everything we have, including our faith, is a gift.

There is a lot of faithless activity today: “Everything is going to heck in a handbasket.” “You’ve got to do this, this, and this.” “There’s not enough time.” I don’t think that matches up to living a life of faith. We can trust that God’s going to put stuff in front of us to do and He’s going to help us to do it.

What spiritual practices—or liturgies of restoration—sustain you?

I attend church services weekly. It’s a practice that grounds me in my identity as a human being and a sinner that’s saved by grace. It’s a practice I need, to go and be reminded of my baptism, that I’ve died and been made new.

My wife and I usually read a devotional together in the morning. It usually goes: drink a cup of coffee, Wordle first or after devotions, and sometimes prayer.

So, to recap, I’m hearing God’s word weekly, and touching base with God’s word daily.

As far as creation care practices, we grow a garden. I do some collecting of food, like wild rice, and some deer hunting. I have found that growing and collecting food is grounding and connective, a way to participate in the gifts that God is giving.

I walk outside daily. It helps because the dog bugs me if I don’t take him out for a walk. There’s a daily rhythm of being outside in a non-human-created environment, in the wind, in the woods, in the fields.

Then I have a group of friends who share experiences of life and the good things that come our way. We acknowledge all this is coming from God.

What advice would you give to current students and recent alumni?

When I think back to my time at Calvin, I was overwhelmed with all the demands of all the classes. I had friends that helped prop me up. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s all up to you. Be aware that you need others and seek out a community of friends as you’re going through school. And be that for others.

I can’t emphasize enough the difference in the human experience, for me, to be able to rest in God’s word of encouragement and salvation. As you’re in all the demands of coursework, remember your baptism, your death in Christ. Remember that God has prepared good works for you to do, and you can do the thing that’s in front of you. It doesn’t have to be some kind of gigantic imprint, or some project that you’re trying to work up on your own.

On a simpler note, get outside and walk every day. Learn new things about creation.

Snyder recommends two resources: The podcast "40 minutes in the Old Testament" by 1517.org and the book Where God Meets Man: Luther’s Down-to-Earth Approach to the Gospel by Gerharde Forde.