Mountains are big, I am small

The first time I ever saw a real live mountain, and the first time I ever traveled outside of the midwest, I was 24 years old. I was in Wyoming, traveling west on I-90. I had spent the night in Gillette. I awoke early that morning and got back on the road. In the distance I spotted a strange cloud formation. I thought it was odd, but I didn't think much of it. I'll never forget the moment when I realized that it was a mountain. It was huge! I kept driving as it slowly began to emerge more clearly on the horizon. I had never seen anything like it.

I spent some time in Seattle, Washington that year. On one particularly clear day I was driving around the city with some friends and I spotted a huge mountain in the distance.

"That's Mt. Ranier," they informed me, "the tallest mountain in the continental United States."

"Cool," I said. "Let's swing over there for a minute and get some pictures."

The looked at each other and giggled, and then turned to me and in a very condescending tone stated, "Umm....it's like two hours away."

I learned two things that year: mountains are big, and I am small. As I drove across Montana and Idaho the first of many times, my breath was taken away by the sheer magnitude of these things. It is an amazingly satisfying feeling to lose yourself in something bigger than yourself. As John Piper says, "No one goes to the Grand Canyon to increase self-esteem. Why do we go? Because there is greater healing for the soul in beholding splendor than there is in beholding self. Indeed, what could be more ludicrous in a vast and glorious universe like this than a human being, on the speck called earth, standing in front of a mirror trying to find significance in his own self-image?"

And so it is that this feeling is but a foretaste of the glory that we long for - not the glory of self, but the glory of self-forgetfulness in being caught up in what is truly glorious. Indeed, we could not know what glory is if these pointers were not there. As C.S. Lewis once said, "Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I do not see how the 'fear' of God could have ever meant to me anything but the lowest prudential efforts to be safe, if I had never seen certain ominous ravines and unapproachable crags. And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the 'love' of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed."

In three weeks I will stand before Mt. McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America. They say you can see its peak from 100 miles away. My goal is to get a fresh lesson in the meaning of glory so that I will have some idea of what I'm talking about when I refer to the glory of God. And yes, I'll be leaving my mirrors at home.