Psalm 8

Saturday morning, I woke up, went to Walmart and picked up the new Coldplay cd. I loaded it into the disc player and headed out.

How do you explain sorrow or define exhilaration. Endless words can be used, but in the end only an experience of the emotions will lend understanding. I will use the best words I have, but even as I write, I know they will be insufficient to describe the sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings I experienced.

The hillsides are a riot of color. Green, orange, yellow, and red explode like fireworks all around. The blue sky yields to lazy clouds that become heavy with moisture. A single cloud fills and falls to the earth. Like dark angry fingers, the cloud unfolds visibly dropping its rain precisely in one spot.

Huge rock croppings push upward from the earth, laughing at gravity’s pull. They stand like sentries forever guarding the ancient secrets that propelled them up out of the ground. With each bend in the road, I have to will myself to breath so stunned am I by the beauty of what I am seeing. Words like: spectacular, incredible, indescribable all come to mind. I am thrilled to be alive.

Suddenly I am in the southwest. I know I didn’t sleep, but with the blink of an eye it is as if I have woken up in a different place. The soil has become red and the aspens have been replaced with low standing cedars who seem crouched against the ground, prepared for an onslaught of wind and snow. I turn off onto an unpaved road that will consume the next 35 miles of my trek.

Just as quickly as it came, the red rock of the desert west is gone. Instead the hills are littered with the black rock of magma spit forth from generations gone by. Entering into the canyon, I find myself paralleling the Colorado River. The river is in a hurry, anxious to reach its destination before the snow and ice slow its progress. In wonder, I examine the walls of this place and consider the painful work the river has completed to burrow itself so deeply into this place.

As I continue on my journey, the scene shifts again and again. The immeasurable display of God’s creativity stuns me mile by mile. In literally thousands of spots along the way, I could have simply stopped and spent the rest of the day doing nothing more than contemplating the colors, the rocks, the ravines, the river, . . .

Like the swiftly changing scenery, I find my mood has changed. Imperceptibly, I have gone from exhilaration to sorrow. I am a spectator to forces and power that are beyond my imagination, much less my control. My insignificance is being illustrated out of every window. I am hemmed in by credible evidence that my movement through the canyon means nothing to the mountain, to the river, or to the sky.

In the face of all this, I ask the Lord, “And who am I that you are mindful of me?”

As soon as I arrived in Aspen, I found myself standing outside of a little church whose Mass was about to begin. I went in and sat in the back as the Father preached: “Get over it, it’s not about you, it’s about Jesus.”