Reflections from High Up

In the mountains of Colorado, the dry air has a strange habit of clarifying and sharpening the mind. Over the span of a week, my brain seemed to lift from the dense fog in which it had previously been entrapped. Our family used to live here in the mountains, and it has been 8 years since we left with no visits in between. It is like being home in many ways, the familiar outline of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range was a memory that had never left me and as we meandered down into the Wet Mountain Valley there they were, still and tranquil, as they had always been. It certainly reminded me of the nature of my mortality, as well as the reality of eternal things. How many lives and ages have those mountains witnessed? As the Psalmist said, man's days are as the grass, we pass away and the place we were remembers us no more. The fact of my limited fleshly existence has been increasingly on my mind of late. I've been forced to repeatedly ask myself, "What are you really about John?". Most of us spend our short lives attempting to build little cocoons of security, often elaborate schemes to seemingly convince ourselves that we are not mortal after all. Women plaster their faces with cosmetics to look younger, 50 year old men leave their wives and attempt to recapture the carefree nature of their youths--all in an effort to ward off the looming specter of age and death. The illusion is a pitiful one, not only because old age will inevitably claim us all, robbing us of our youth and vitality, but because death is a constant certainty for the old as well as the young--it shows no partiality. As I have learned, it can claim a 28 year old young woman as easily as one confined to a nursing home bed. There is no way to avoid the truth, and for an individual to really and truly be 'living in reality' as the saying goes, should he/she not daily be conscious of death's face and live their lives accordingly? I am not speaking of the 'eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die' attitude, nor of some morbid fascination with death, but instead an enlightened existence that sees carnal mortality for the enemy that it truly is--a vision that acknowledges and understands the true minuscule nature of our life spans here on earth, and one that looks beyond them to a larger spiritual realm that is forever eternal--a view of true reality that begs a question in regard to the time we walk the earth: in the words of Francis Schaeffer, 'How then shall we live?'