A Sunday School lesson, and the discussion started turning around the short command in the Bible to “Stand in high places.”
“What does that phrase mean to you?” the teacher asked.
I’ve been finding myself going back to that question all day since.
Having gone to college at BYU in the Rocky Mountains, and having just read Greg Mortenson’s book, I find myself drawn to the image of high peaks.
I used to get away from my classes and studying and find release by walking briskly across the bench of the mountain directly facing campus. Often. To give you an idea: Robert Redford owned a ski resort, Sundance, on the other side of the next peak over. These were not low-lying hills.
A few times, I climbed trails way up into areas where it was probably really stupid to be at certain times of the year, and where I found out later were off limits due to potential avalanches, but as someone from Maryland to whom it was all a novelty, what did I know? I stood under a dripping outcropping and pointed my camera upwards, getting a shot of water falling above and behind me in such a way that my roommates puzzled at its trajectory and which way was supposed to be up in the picture. They couldn’t tell which end the water was coming from.
I went higher. You can see a lot more of what’s ahead when you take the time to make the effort to do something that doesn’t come easily.
I sat on a boulder, dangling my feet. (Not a high one. There are limits to this courage thing as far as heights and I are concerned.) I remember being surprised that long, narrow Utah Lake looked so blue and so close from up there. Distances shrank. The mountains that rose from the far side of the lake, across the valley, you could actually see them, and then peak after peak fading from blue to light gray and off into the distance. All these things that, back down on the valley floor, I knew would disappear from view into the curve of the earth or the buildings of the campus and town.
So far away. So clear as day.
I tell you. God rocks.