lent || high & low
By day I was on top of a mountain that overlooked my home and by night time I was sitting at the beach watching the tide role in. At the beach, welcomed by the comfort of some great beach chairs that my friend Janna owns, we sat at sand level as giant waves threw themselves to the shore reaching out to touch our toes. I think we moved back three times, but the surf would have never touches us if we were to stay in our original spot. As we talked each of us kept looking over imagining a wave sweeping us away. Each time a wave got close, bubbling its way out of the dark sea, we would start to grab things, pulling them to safety. Then the question came up, “What would you grab?” This is the same question we asked as kids when you imagined your house burning down, “What would I grab?” Or what is the most important thing you own. Sure, you would make sure Lisa and Erin, mom and dad were safe but what then would you maybe even run back for? To give such value to things is dangerous business but what is it? The iPhone, that sentimental picture, a bible, that other book, clothes?
I feel like this question has to be visited in a rhetorical sense. There is no one thing I would really give so much value to that I would be willing to risk my life to have it. But it is true that I give life and energy over to things without the motivation of a burning house. To me this is a question of what I believe is lasting, and what I trust to be good.
The tallest mountain in the world is around 28,ooo feet while the lowest place on earth is around 36,ooo feet. That is to say that if Mount Everest were thrown into the Pacific the waters could swallow it whole. High and low the filled world is vast-beyond what we can wrap our minds or our hands around. There is just to much space and to much beauty for us to hold on to. I was standing at a gap in Colorado this past summer on a solo trip that was intended to get me hyped for starting school again. I was just below a 14,ooo foot peak and felt dwarfed by its colors and bright glow as the sun made snowfields dance with color. I then looked down into the green valley. Separating the two extremes was this small man standing at the gap, looking up then looking down, looking up then looking down again and wondering what questions what thoughts could describe this experience. So I pulled out my journal and I had no words. Not one.
I was reaching-grappling for things to say so that I might remember the feeling of being between the bigness of the world but only the sense of smallness was evoked. The next day I skipped stones on a glacier carved lake back behind the gap and felt feelings of smallness shift to a sense of connectedness. This world we play in is the same world God plays in. This dance, this playful exhale amidst awesome wonder, is what I might grab for. Janna and I talked and I think I tried to describe this sort of thing in terms of human relationship. If it were to all be stripped away what would we have left?
connection with others.
It is tough to describe what this connection is but I trust it is Jesus at the center, holding it together. The lasting thing, what we trust to be good, is our shared life. Often this is what is true beyond a doubt to us. It is our experience, our journey and our knowing of others through love that hums with a sort of holy longing. The end of the film, “Into the Wild” as one man’s journey is summarized and even grieved, his notebook reads, “Better shared.” He dies alone in one of the most beautiful places in the world with nobody. Better shared. Beaches are better shared, gaps are better shared because you can’t quite put words to to those places in time that become sanctuaries for the soul. Our blazes in this life.
