Had These Mountains the Ability to Reason

If I haven't stated it previously, my weekends border insanity. Though I enjoy my job and love the people with whom I work, I was feeling a need to retreat today after teaching my last class. 

I turned on some Sufjan and finished Through Painted Deserts for something like the 200th time this evening. It never gets old. Ever. 

And while I sometimes feel my literary inspiration should come from dead people who constructed "the classics," my spirit resonates with a more modern, more bohemian author. In fact I have quite a crush on Donald Miller, as evidenced by my ability to read his books over and over without tiring of them.

 

Even tonight, though I've read it so many times before, I became teary as I wrapped up Through Painted Deserts, feeling as though I had made the cross-country excursion with he and his best friend Paul and learned better the answers of the cosmos...

And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man's weak praise should be given God's attention.

It's a wonder that those exposed to such beauty forfeit the great questions in the face of this miraculous evidence. I think again about this small period of grace, and thank God for it, that if only for a season, I could feel the "why" of life, see it in the metaphor of light, in the endlessness of the cosmos, in the miracle of friendship. And had these mountains the ability to reason, perhaps they would contemplate the beauty of humanity, and praise God for the miracle that each of us is, pondering the majesty of God and the wonder of man in one bewildering context. 

Their brows are rumpled even now, and their arms are stretched toward heaven.

-Don Miller-