A MOUNTAIN IN THE MAKING

“They are so beautiful!” I heard this again and again over the past week vacationing with my wife’s family in the interior of Colorado. Whenever someone looked out of the windows or off the deck of our lodge that was surrounded by them, “They are so beautiful.” When we took a train ride and looked out to the horizon to a distant higher range, “They are so beautiful!” And of the surrounding ones from the top of the tallest in the vicinity, “They are so beautiful!” And they were. What? What were so beautiful? The mountains! In order not to ruin the experience in the moment, when any remarked on the beauty of the mountains, I suppressed the urge to inquire, “Beautiful? Do you know how those mountains were formed? The process was anything but beautiful. It was ugly. If the earth had nerves, it was excruciatingly painful. Wherever there are mountains, there has been a collision. Two continental plates have collided with each other. The speed was immaterial. The tremendous force at impact and the growing tension afterward wasn’t. Similar in size, one plate refused to sink beneath or give to the other. Much like dueling elk bucks, horns locked and each pawing forward. The force between the two began to crush and crumble the rock at the point of contact. Edges broken off from the plates were shoved upwards at steep angles from the horizontal plane. And, voila, mountains! Mountains are the remains of a wreck between tectonic plates. Think of a car wreck. In the rest of reality, the remains of wrecks are ugly. Sad. Unsightly. Horrifying. Not so with the wreck of the earth’s plates. The remains of the wrecks are beautiful. The remains are mountains. And mountains are beautiful. Often in our lives, we are hit by things with devastating impact. Out of nowhere. Betrayals of relationships. Bad reports of an MRI. Chronic illnesses. Rejection. Loss of a job. Life-changing injury. Ruin of home. Opposing forces collide into our lives dashing our dreams, hazarding our hopes, ripping apart our relationships, fracturing our friendships, crushing our contentment, and pulverizing our peace. What happens is ugly, painful, and devastating. Without God. Without Grace. Without Love. Without faith, the end result of these cataclysmic forces in our lives would be as ugly and unsightly as their cause. But not so with God. The same God that used the ugly forces of the collision and crumbling of tectonic plates to form mountains uses the ugly forces that slam into the lives of those who put their trust in Him to bring about something beautiful. As Joseph succinctly and poignantly put it: “You meant it for evil but God for good.” It was ugly, but God made it beautiful. No one calls wrecked cars beautiful. Nor homes crushed by tornadoes. But wrecked plates of rocks? People look at those and say, “Beautiful!” Could not mountains be enigmatic reminders from God? Reminders that, because He is providentially involved in all that happens in the lives of His children, whatever devasting forces slam into us leaving behind horrible and hurtful wreckage, He can turn even all of that into something beautiful? Yes! The ashes, He makes beautiful. The mourning, an oil of joy. The spirit of heaviness, a garment of praise. The splinters of damage, stately trees of grace. The upheaval of wreckage, beautiful. Do not all things work together for good to those who are called to and love God? Next time you look at a panorama of mountains and find yourself exclaiming, “They are so beautiful!” remember that they are the remains of an ugly cataclysm. A wreck. They are the detritus of a demolishing disaster. And then remember that God can do the same with the ruins and wreckage of a life, a dream, and a past. All that has been horrible. Painful. Devastating. That wreckage God turns into beautiful mountains. That devastation is not just a miserable mess. It’s a mountain in the making*. ---Pastor Clifford Hurst *Mountains once so formed, continue to grow. God not only brings beauty from the impact of adversity and devastation, He brings growth.