Cyber Column by Berry D. Simpson: Sunlight in the mountains

Posted: 10/28/05

CYBER COLUMN:
Sunlight in the mountains

By Berry D. Simpson

It was late Friday afternoon, and the view from the top of Bush Mountain (at 8,631 feet, the second-highest peak in Texas) was phenomenal. To the south, I could see the sun reflecting off the stainless steel monument on top of Guadalupe Peak. To the west, I saw the Chihuahuan Desert and vast salt flats 4,000 feet below my feet. On the northwest horizon, I could see snow-covered Sierra Blanca 110 miles away. And looking north, I could sight along the western escarpment of the Guadalupe Range, a severe cliff face that stretched on and on for miles. It was beautiful.

However, as I stood there taking in the scenery, it occurred to me that my day was still two miles from being over, and I had a problem. The only thing I could not see from my perch was the trail. I tried to find it, crisscrossing the mountaintop, hoping to intersect the trail, but I couldn’t find it. My legs were weary from the long day, and I was getting worried. All I could see around me were big rocks and thorny bushes and scrubby pine trees; I knew I didn’t have enough daylight left to bushwhack my way to the Pine Top campground before dark.

Standing with my hands hooked through the straps of my backpack, my prayer changed from, “Lord, help me make wise decisions,” to “Lord, help me find the trail,” a subtle but significant shift from abstract to real. And then, amazingly enough, I remembered a National Forest sign that said, “No Horses,” and why would they say that unless it was an intersection of some sort, and maybe I should go back and look. Sure enough, when I retraced back to the sign, I found my trail. Maybe that answered prayer was one the lessons for my trip. Maybe my praying needs to be more real.

Oswald Chambers wrote, “There are vast areas of stubbornness and ignorance the Holy Spirit has to reveal in each of us, but it can only be done when Jesus gets us alone. Jesus cannot teach us anything until we quiet all our intellectual questions and get alone with him.” Well, I was certainly alone with him now. I hadn’t seen anyone in a day and a half.

That morning got off to a slow start. I was camped down in a valley among the pine trees at the Tejas campground, and it was cold. I woke up to frost inside my tent, and all my water bottles were frozen. Even the T-shirt and long-sleeved pullover I’d worn the day before and laid out to dry overnight were frozen stiff like cardboard. At least my pen still worked. Before I left Midland, Cyndi made me promise to come home right away if the ink in my pen froze. It didn’t. I could stay in the mountains.

Saturday morning was much warmer and brighter. I got up early, anxious for the sun to raise my temperature so I could peel a few layers of clothes off before loading my pack and heading down the mountain. But the effect of the rising sun against the east face of the great mountain stunned me. It was a huge sunrise in the mountains. It was bright, brilliant, overwhelming, intense, warm, hot, clear, full of clarity, intense, awakening, purifying, convicting, humbling, revealing—an unmistakable reminder of God, the Lord of my life.

The eastern slopes of the Guadalupe Mountains are hard and stark and rocky and barren and stripped-down minimalist, but the sunlight didn’t care. Sunlight doesn’t need green forests or ocean waves or ancient redwoods to shine on so it can show off. Like God, sunlight carries its own brilliance; all it needs is something to touch.

As the shadows fell away and the sunlight crawled across the ground, all I could think about was Psalms: “This is too glorious, too wonderful to believe; I can never be lost to Your Spirit.” I was so overwhelmed, well, I would’ve fallen to my knees in praise, but the Guadalupe Mountains are too hard and pointy, and I still needed both knees to get down the Tejas Trail to my Jeep so I could drive home to Cyndi. I had to be practical in my worship, more like Martha than Mary. I hoped it was OK to protect my knees while worshipping God. Surely he understands.

In Out of the Question … Into the Mystery, Leonard Sweet writes: “We find the truth and reveal the hiddenness and mystery of God in Christ as we lose ourselves in the GodLife relationship. There is a time to leave words behind for a walkabout with Jesus of listening and seeing and adoring a world rimmed with sunsets and brimming with sunrises.”

Berry Simpson, a Sunday school teacher at First Baptist Church in Midland, is a petroleum engineer, writer, runner and member of the city council in Midland. You can contact him through e-mail at berry@stonefoot.org.