“I lift up my eyes
to the hills--
where does my help come from?” Psalm 121:1
Car-makers know something about
the American public that no one else does:
to wit, that we all secretly long to stretch our legs in the wide-open
country of the Great Plains. Why?—I
don’t know, but automobile ads very frequently seem to feature “the
country”—more specifically, the rural Midwest and Great
Plains .
Makes sense, I suppose. According to the U. S. Census, the states
with the longest average daily commutes are New York ,
New Jersey , Maryland ,
Illinois , and California .
Backed-up freeways don’t sell cars.
Where is commute time least? You
guessed it: South
Dakota , North Dakota , Montana , Nebraska .
What sells cars is the mythic
backroads adventure—SUVs, four-wheeling, mud-defying pickups, even though very
few of us ever do any off-roading. What
sells car is the perception of escaping bottlenecks, fast food, strip malls,
and wearying eight-lane metro traffic. What sells cars is the siren song of
getting away.
In that sense, the psalmist is
just like everybody else: he lifts up his eyes to the hills. He wants to get away. A place on the lake,
maybe a river—that’ll do it. Doesn’t need to be big either, just a cabin, and
I’m outta’ here.
It may well be a version of the
old “grass is always greener” argument, this verse. From the day-to-day grind of our lives—same
faces, same cluttered desks, same blasted lunch counters and restrooms—we
simply want release.
We fantasize. I remember dreaming
of living near mountains. Then, we did. But grading papers is grading papers,
and we never got up there, even though those mountains were close. The only
times I took note of them was on my bike, riding to work, when they seemed as
much a dream as they ever had been.
Forty years later it’s still in
me, this yearning to look to the hills.
I’m about to grow gills. For the
last month, every Saturday, every weekend, it has rained. My forays into the
rolling hills west of town ground to a halt four weeks ago, and me and my
camera have been missing the gold-quilts maturing beans lay over the land. There’s
been no sun on Saturdays.
Dark and dreary weather has kept
me from a weekly pilgrimage that has been the joy of my life for the last
several years, Saturday morning country wandering. I could be in one of those ads.
God doesn’t dwell in some
hand-hewn log cabin in the hills. He doesn’t even weekend there. He got a place
at the lake all right but no Airstream or fifth wheel. Yosemite is as gorgeous
a place as you can find on earth. Jasper, the Big Horns, Yellowstone, the
Canadian Rockies—even the words get me itchy. He’s there too, but he’s not just there.
The psalmist must have felt it too
because the first line of this beautiful psalm of praise and joy is a confession,
I think—I lift up my eyes to the hills, as if he’s there somewhere, as if God
is in residence at Custer State Park. When we get tired or bored or stymied, we
all want to go somewhere we’re not.
But the hills won’t do it. Weekend
rains for a month, and I’ve got to remind myself those little Saturday trips
don’t bring me home.
Help doesn’t come from the
hills. Our help comes from the Lord.
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