Sunday Morning Meds--Awesome

They who dwell in the ends of the earth 

stand in awe of your signs;

You make the dawn and the sunset shout for joy. Psalm 65:8

Just exactly what are "the ends of the earth," I suppose, varies with whoever recites the line. To some, it's here, the far northwest corner of a state known primarily for corn. To others, it's some woebegone corner deep in the darkest corner of the Amazon rain forest or some unreachable height in the Himalayas. Having just left Alaska, I'd suggest any of the hundreds of rugged wilderness places we just left fit the bill, despite the fact that Alaska is where, ironically, the "ends" of the earth may most closely approximate the earth's very beginnings. 

Alaska doesn't have to cordon off its wildernesses because they're not likely to become "developed," as we say. If the place were to be somehow affixed to the western edge of the lower 48, we call San Francisco the Middle West--it's that vast. If January temperatures weren't enough of a hinderance, the dark night of midwinter would be cause enough to stay away. 

Because it is so formidable, the place is draw-dropping. It's difficult to imagine anyone not being silenced at a thousand turnouts along Alaskan highways. The landscape devours whatever the human imagination can conjure; it's so huge it seems endless.

The Denali guide that drove us through the park proclaimed joyously that the passengers in her bus were blessed like few others--maybe 80 percent of those she takes through never see "the mountain," McKinley/Denali itself. We did, some of it anyway; the tallest peak in North America is only rarely left bare naked by clouds that bedeck its peaks. It's here in all its pomp and circumstance--or at least this is what we could see of it. 

It's hard to be prideful when you're almost anywhere in Alaska. The world is not only big, it's magnificent, so huge it rescues the word awesome from the cliché it's become. Hundreds of thousands of silenced tourists are somewhere in Alaska right now, as there will be most of the year, even mid-winter, and lots of them, right now, are just stunned.

And what of the aboriginals, the real locals, who sit and stand imaginatively, the heathen of old-fashioned mission hymns? What did they know about creation's magnificence, and when did they know it, the folks Captain Kidd stumbled on in his remarkable travels?

If we believe the psalmist, living in the daily presence of all of that glory, it may well be that they believed and knew more than we might believe or even imagine about the Source of all the magnificence around them. 

Faith begins, Calvin said, in the kind of awe that Alaska wears as work clothes: "It begins when we come to grips with the hard lesson that we're not much at all when we stand somewhere in the bold, magnificent presence of God."

And He said, “Behold, I make a covenant. Before all thy people I will do marvels such as have not been done in all the earth, nor in any nation; and all the people among whom thou art shall see the work of the Lord, for it is a fearsome thing that I will do with thee. Exodus 34:10.

In Alaska especially, it's just plain difficult not to recognize that this world is not our own, that we belong to it and to him, the Creator and Redeemer. 

Even the ends of the earth magnify his name. Pull over sometime and have a look yourself.