When Man Seems Out of Place

“I have felt the wind blow, whispering your name, and I have seen your tears fall when I watch the rain…”

There is a great sense of awe for me in traversing the rugged, the steep, or the out of the way.  One reaches perhaps the climax of beauty itself when he finds himself in a location where the stuff of man seems grotesquely out of place, when he can realize that he is no match for the height or grandeur of a snowcapped peak, and that nothing he could possibly contrive out of building materials could look like more than a few popsicle sticks crudely fastened to the side of a behemoth of a peak.

For me, my heart flutters at times like this.  There’s just something that seems so appropriate about the blaring praise music on a car stereo as you ascend into the unknown.  My soul is comforted as my mind reels at the majesty and the grandeur of the forest, the splash of mountain streams, the crisp freshness of high-altitude air, and the appearance of purity as your car nears a snow-capped peak.  It’s as if the car stereo gives voice to the rocks as they cry out, as if the drumbeat is echoing the trees as they clap for joy.

It’s at times like this, however when God reminds me how small I am.  "What are men compared to rocks and mountains?"  Who am I in the scale of a mountain?  As we drove to Petrohué and up part of Osorno volcano this Saturday, I couldn’t help but realize how out of place the stuff of man appeared.  I was not sure if I should laugh at the irony or be depressed that a brightly colored ski resort kept insisting on ruining my pictures.  Here it was, something feeble that the hand of man had created trying to hold fast and to claim even a speck of the beauty of this breathtaking volcano.

I even tried to climb up a path that I saw in the distance so that my grandma could get a picture of me with the snow-capped volcano in it, but even this plan failed miserably.  In the frame, I was just a speck on the hillside next to the one with snow on it, which really couldn’t be seen in the picture as the frame was nowhere near big enough to show both me AND the volcano.

What is man?  Where is his home?  Certainly not here, I thought.  God’s handiwork was more than sufficiently stamped all over this landscape.  If a camera from close to me couldn’t even fit me, an average person in the frame with this mountain, how much bigger and more impressive is our God?  The bright, inviting colors of the ski resort paled in comparison to with the expanse of the Andes Mountains we were standing on, the only thing separating us from Argentina, the way a feeble crayon drawing would pale in comparison to Starry Night.

Man was not meant to live here.  The handiwork of man cannot begin to compare to grandeur and the vastness that is the creation we are merely a part of.  And yet, God cares for every individual part of his creation the way a painter carefully places brush strokes so that his overall picture looks just right from afar. Man was not meant for this world.  He was not meant to live at sea level; he was not made to live too close to the summit of Mt. Everest.  Man was not made to live in a city where commerce and advertising for the works of man dictate even what se sees out his window; man was not made to live in or to admire something of his own creation.  Man, like the rest of the creation he is merely a part of, was made to glorify and to long after his creator.

How much more beautiful than the vastness of a mountain range will it be when man is finally reunited with God?  If it takes me hours, days, or weeks to fully understand the vastness of one volcano by driving, hiking, or biking it, how much longer will it take me to actually grasp the vastness of God?

No, one lifetime on Earth isn’t hardly enough, but for this, He’s given us eternity.




For more volcano pictures: (http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2073036&id=1461390133&l=3000840514)