Grassstains.net

One thing you find yourself thinking about on a road trip is the question, “Why did this town spring up here in the middle of no where.  We slept in the town of Cortez the previous evening, and that was all I could think about.  Why here?  Moab is kind of the same thing in my mind.  Though there is a perfectly good explanation, I found this question going through my mind a bunch today as we worked our way through Utah, and maybe it was simply because of the desert landscape.  It’s starkness is so very different from the Northwest.  Maybe it was just large plains of arid land, that suddenly were able to produce lots of crops because of the wonders of irrigation that caused souls much hardier than I to say this is where we will settle.

Now maybe I’m the only one who thinks of these things, and that would be fine by me, but I found myself thinking about the terrain and the land we traveled today a lot.  We awoke in Moab to a late start in our intended desires to experience Arches National Park.  Wiser people would have been up at dawn to go hiking through the desert, but here we were departing our hotel at ten in the morning and heading to Arches.  The temperature was already 90 degrees, and by the end of the day we would see it push into the 100’s.  Of course 90 here is way better than the humid 90 in Oregon.  The air is so dry that it just doesn’t feel all that hot – you actually have to move a bit to start perspiring.

So, I think about why towns are where they are, and eventually this moves to simply looking at the landscape, and new questions careen around my head.  Why is the ground so red around Moab?  How in the world did that arch form?  Why does that rock wall look like a cake decorating experiment gone bad?  Times like this it would be handy to have the Rorricks around, as their expertise in geology would immediately answer questions that will bounce around in my head until they are lost to forgetfulness, or answered by Google.

Anyway – I found myself shortly after lunch walking through an area in Arches called the Devil’s Garden.  Karen and Andy were already whipped from earlier walks (should have been up at dawn I said as I headed into the Garden, but truthfully no one was getting up that early today), and opted to stay back at the car.  So, I find myself musing on some of the stuff above.  Who named this area the Devil’s Garden?  Why?  Yes it was hot.  Yes it was filled with twisted trees, prickly cacti, and rocks that looked at times as if they were melting in the heat.  Yes I drank a lot of water in my trek across slickrock and sand, but this area and this park are truly beautiful in their own right.  It may have been the Devil’s Garden in the mind of some cartographer, but it seemed to me to be more of a playground that pointed to the good pleasure of our Lord.  Arches strikes me as some giant sandbox where God simply did things for his delight (much like a kid forms castles and walls on the beach, or stacks rocks one upon the other to see how high he can go).  For thousands of years no one, but no one looked upon this terrain except for the One who crafted it, and in the utter absence of humanity God delighted in it’s beauty and desolation.  He was praised in it’s austere bleakness, and in it’s Picasso like designs and lines.  And he no doubt awaited the day when the pinnacle of his creation would lay eyes upon what He had done.
So, we played.  We climbed, we hiked, we imagined figures and faces in the twisted rock.  And because creation at some level declares the character and glory of God, even as we played, I found myself musing on biblical metaphors of rocks and trees, and stories of men who found God long ago in the desert.  And so, I worshiped.