An Extended Hand

For some strange reason I'm reminded tonight of a trip I took a few years ago to Palo Duro Canyon, a deep scar cut in the sandstone and rocky face of the Texas panhandle. Though the magnitude of this big hole doesn't always make you take a step back or leave your lungs locked and unable to breathe like the Grand Canyon does, it still reinforces how little you are compared to the great workmanship polished by the Creator. It's a giant sized canyon, second in the nation next to, of course, that other one further out west. That one nearly doubles Palo Duro in every category, excpet in depth, where the Big One does more than double the number set by PD- it completely shatters it. Palo Duro only reaches 800 feet towards the center of the earth, the Grand Canyon yawns a staggering 6000. Blanketed by a bold red dirt that you could only find underneathe the white, sand bedsheet of the West Texas surface, the canyon floor is scattered with powerful trees, reaching and waving its limbs up to the roof of the world like paintbrushes painting the colors of sunrise across the empty canvas of sky. Sagebrush and wildflowers decorate the canyon like stars thrown against a desert night sky. Like all canyons, she is carved by water and time. Water and time are God's chisel, used to carve out monuments of such magnitude either in the ground or on top of it, both designed with the intention to knock us off our feet and on our ass. They are His most used tools. The ones He'll use to create things that will make us wonder about Him and what He's thinking. They make the things that silence our doubts about Him, stir our soul and remind us what it once meant to call ourselves His child. So we stand either on the rim of a great hole, like Palo Duro or the Grand Canyon, or we stand at the bottom lost in the shadows of their walls, and we're swallowed up by the magnificant humiliation you feel only when you're standing in the middle of God's glory. There's a story that seperates the trip I took to Palo Duro from the trip I took to the Grand Canyon, a story I'd like to share with you now. Now don't get me wrong, Palo Duro is absolutely nothing compared to the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon could swallow Palo Duro 100 times and still be starving. My eyes have never seen such a place, my heart never salivated at the splendor of our Savior as much as it did when I stood on what felt like the edge of the world that day in the Arizona desert. It's just that I learned different things, was in fact, told, new things from the Creator when I sat scribbling away in a fresh journal watching the sun disappear behind the backdrop of the Texas horizon.

Before you lose yourself in the clutter and jargon of my style, analogies, metephors, you know, the stuff writers like to ornament their lines with, let me tell you straight up, without any confusion, what it was I heard whispered to me in the time I spent out there. It may seem vague at first, but hang with me, I promise it will be explained.

"I created all this so that you, man, might live. I created her, woman, so that you, man, might learn love."

I was told this in the whispering of God on the hood of a car in the bottom of Palo Duro Canyon. At the time I was completely wrapped up in an incredible girl. It was intense. We prayed together, asked God to be at the core of what we were as a couple, wanted him to be the third wheel that always tagged along. We read books in the Bible together, talked about how each individual verse stirred our hearts deeply and romantically. We were patient with each other, wasted nothing and was careful with every moment of our relationship. We held out for that perfect moment when all things collide, resulting the spark of the first kiss. We didn't waste it on when the moment felt right, we itched in anticipation for the moment when the timing was perfect. We would write love letters to each other, but they weren't about us, they were about Him. The thesis of every letter was about how our souls were being wooed by the Maker and as a result our union as boy and girl was branded by the deeping of a relationship with The Cross. I was headed into my senior year of high school and had seriously thought that I had found the one. The only time I have ever actually known what love for someone of the opposite sex other than my mom and my sister actually felt like. And here I was, a seventeen year old kid sitting on the hood of a car staring up at the Cosmos, and as I'm staring up there, into the vast nothingness of endless time and space, the stars take shape and spell this out for me against the blackboard of night. My mind bombarded with thoughts of her face and the penstrokes of Yahweh. And in the beauty and complexity of a woman, I learned love, about the pursuit of one heart after another, about the elegant chasing and eventual dancing of mingeld and messy souls bonded by the shoelaces of Christ. God, that moment was right. I loved a girl and I loved God. I sat surrounded by the blueprints of learning how to live and how to love. I stood in the middle of the wild frontier of God's creation and was told, not by my imagination, or by my conscious, but my the very groaning of Christ, that being here, in the middle of his most obvious display of glory, devotion, grace, and boasting is where I will find life fufilled. And then I was told that in her, a woman, God's most radiant product hands down, is where I will learn to love. The trip to the Grand Canyon never told me this. It told me that God was big, really big, but forgot to tell me that in that glory was life beyond any capacity of my reasoning and that in her was a love not yet truly recgonized. So as I'm sitting there, with my hands over my mouth, trying desperately to soak all this in, God interrupts my night in the canyon to tell me one more thing.

" But you will never know any of this like it was intented if I'm not at the core."

The truth is this- You can experience all things apart from Christ: love, sex, romance, poetry, the trees, the mountains, the ocean, the stars, the sky, space, time, family, friendship, community, family, money, music, beauty, all things good and right you can know. With Christ they can be known intimately. He makes bright things brighter, great things even better. If we are not careful with how we hold His hand, we fumble and fall, and lose the ability to know these things how they were intended. We never experience their full capabilty. Without the cross of Christ at the core of who we are, we forget about living and loving. We forget about the glory exposing power of creation and the love-breeding ground the Eve walks on. I did. Eventually I lost her, I let go because I stole the sword from Him and tried to do the fighting on my own. I bombed. I sucked at it. My face had more blood on it than the blade of my sword did. I spent countless nights pounding the floor of my room begging God to give her back, to make me better at all of this, to teach about it all over again, but she was long gone. His will for my life had already taken a new course. The days of the canyon had passed because I polluted my core with the world and myself. Life and love with intention had vanished like vapor. He was purposefully pulling me into the desert, away from the shadow of the canyon walls, and into the dry, desolate desert where the only thing we can do is reach with broken fingers for the palm of His open hand or succumb to the crippling blows of a reckless war for heart. In the desert you either fight for your life or you lay down and die. In the desert the sun always sets and day turns to night, and even as you lay there on your broken back staring up into the open wound of the cosmos, spilling out the stars, the planets, and the moon set against the black blood of space, God whispers...

"I created all this so that you, man, might live like it was intended." He smiles and extends His hand, hoping that you grab it, and quietly speaks in your ear, "Hey man, let's get out of here."

Grab it, get up, and go with Him.