Lift Up Your Eyes

I look up to the mountains; does my strength come from mountains? 

No, my strength comes from God, who made heaven, and earth, and mountains...

While walking the long stretch of the West Highland Way that runs across the open bleakness that is Rannoch Moor, my eyes were drawn to the mountains that border that vast place. Huge, brooding masses of rock standing sentry, dominating the landscape as they have for aeons.

I wandered with the words of Psalm 121, a personal favourite, turning them over in my mind. That God, who caused these mountains in all their awesome vastness, to be, was the source of strength, of life, for me; was in that wild landscape, overwhelming. I nearly gasped out loud with the thought of it - the God who made these mountains (who was behind the incredible geological forces that had shaped the world around me), the God who made the earth (who had, in ways my mind cannot grasp, brought this planet into being in time and space), the God who somehow stood behind and had ordered the infiniteness of the universe; this God, this great Creating, Sustaining God, gives me life, and strength, and purpose, and protection.

And though God’s fulness is far beyond the limits of my mind, I can look up to the mountains and be reminded that though God is bigger than my problems, bigger than my needs, bigger than anything I can see; God is also present with and personal to me. It is God the world-maker who won’t let me stumble, the sleepless God who is at my side to protect me, the ever present God who guards my life - when I leave home, and when I return home, now and always.