By Chris Turner
Director of communications, Tennessee Baptist Mission Board
It was chilly and so quiet that the only sound present when I took my early morning walk was my labored breathing.
The nearly 6,000-foot elevation in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Yosemite National Park quickly reminded me I’m a sea-level kind of guy. The immensity of everything surrounding me — mountains, trees, open spaces — command attention and inspire reflection.
But for me, there is something about the mountains, and the cold air — and the lack of oxygen — that clears the mental clutter and awakens the mind. The silence and solitude offered spiritual space to process what I’d experienced the previous few days. Four specific observations made an impression on me.
(1) Man is very, very small. Standing in Yosemite Valley and gazing upward to the summits of El Capitan, Half Dome and Cathedral Rock, and the point at which water first charges over Upper Yosemite Falls — appearing as if roaring from the sky — is like gazing upward in the grandest of reformation-era European cathedrals. All are reminders that God is limitless, magnificent, beautiful, awful, without equal; and that man is not the center of the universe. Far from it. We are at best bit actors in a cosmic production, and we must move to the periphery and yield center stage to God and His rightful place as the show’s headliner.
(2) I’ve observed two extreme perspectives of people here in these spectacular mountains. Either the creation is worshiped, or it is ignored because it has become so familiar. Both are failures to worship the Creator as He intended. Corollary thought: Do Christians too often become so familiar with Christianity that we fail to appropriately worship its Author?
(3) This week I am memorizing the Nicene Creed along with our daughter as an act of solidarity for an assignment she must complete for her honors program. There is a line related to Jesus Christ that reads: “Through Him all things were made. For us and for our salvation.”
Think about that. God created all things, including us, so that we might see it all as an expression of His love and beauty, and in response, worship Him.
And when we failed, He graciously provided us with salvation through Jesus the Son, that we might return to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” We are utterly dependent on our Heavenly Father for everything, and He has provided everything we utterly need.
(4) If a fallen, broken, sinful, decaying world is this beautiful, think what it must have looked like before Adam and Eve “exchanged the glory of God for a lie.” And just imagine what it will be like when Jesus returns and creates a new heaven and a new earth.
Our imaginations won’t imagine that magnificently, but we should try, and keep trying, to compel our minds upward to more closely capture the vision of God that He intends for us to have.
There is so much brokenness in this world, but there is also unending evidence to remind us that there is but one God, He is “the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” He is in control, He has purpose in every circumstance, He provides salvation, and He fully intends to accomplish everything He planned in eternity past to accomplish.
It is to us to look upward, and by faith and gratitude, worship Him. B&R