On Things That are BIG

I am fascinated by things that are big, things that are big with a bigness that confounds the ability of the eye to take it all in at once. There are some objects, man-made or natural, that simply leave me a gape at the immensity of it all. I love when something makes me feel very, very small and insignificant when I am up against it. My life's quest is to go to places that stagger me with their enormity.

Mountains do this. I use to live in Tennessee at the foot of the Smoky Mountains. While they are not big by mountain standards. They get made fun of by the bigger mountain ranges, probably picked on a lot, too. They are the four-eyed, 98 pound weakling of mountain ranges. Yet, somehow when I'm climbing a part of them or simply driving through them I am overwhelmed by them. The mountains in Arizona that I've driven through on my way to the Indian reservation--rugged, scrub-covered, dry, and unforgiving--bring me up short and cause me to stare dumbly out the window (not recommended if you are the one actually driving, though).

Canyons, powerful rivers, Lake Michigan, and wide-open spaces with skies that go on forever into oblivion, these, too, drive me to simply stand back in awe. They speak of Something infinite that has no beginning and no end, only a vast "middle" that never stops being the "middle."

Tall buildings--Sears Tower, the World Trade Centers, the Empire State Building--man-made marvels of engineering genius stagger me. All I can do is step back and stare up, up, up into a blue sky broken by steel and glass that reflects that hustle of life below.

I am terrified of snakes, but I am struck dumb and paralyzed by the site of an anaconda, the biggest of all snakes. It's mammoth size, stuff Hollywood movies are made of, is simply too much for my mind to take in. Snakes are supposed to be small; this one has simply been created differently, a king among the snakes.

This is all to say that I want to go to Montana. I want to go someplace that is so wide open that cameras are useless in their attempts to capture the scope of the bigness before me. I want to go to places that remind me of my place in the Story, that I am just here today and gone tomorrow; to remind me that I fit into a tiny blip on the time-radar; to remind me to make that blip count for something; and to remind me that there is Something that is bigger than all of it.

shalom, matt