Scaling Zion

A few weeks back we traveled out West to visit family and see God’s country. While we saw many wonderous things including the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the Hoover Dam in Nevada, The Mojave Desert in California, nothing was so inspiring as Zion National Park in Utah. If you ask the staff, or my family, I can sometimes exhibit a larger-than-life personality. Yet nothing made me feel as humble, and in awe, as the mountains, valleys, and wildlife within Zion. All at once I was confronted with questions of creation.

My wife and I pondered, with such beauty abounding, how can people not believe in God? If God took all this care to create nature (Mathew 6:27), how could I believe that I am any less significant? God’s fingerprints were everywhere. In fact, the park was named Zion by the Mormons that settled there in the 1800’s, after Mount Zion of Israel. Which in the Bible was considered a place of refuge, and a holy eternal city. To further demonstrate God’s handiwork, within the park there is a series of mountains called the Court of the Patriarchs, named Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, as pictured above. While we did not climb them, they did give me perspective.

As I look back on this twelve-day vacation in relation to a tough couple of years in the life of our family, God brought a scriptural principle to bear. You cannot appreciate the mountaintop until you have been in the valley, and vice versa. Otherwise, your entire walk would be a flatline of sameness. Nothing gained and nothing lost. Traveling between those two tensions of the high-highs, and low-lows is where we gain endurance, wisdom, appreciation, etc. Likewise, the journey of transformation from suffering to sanctified is meant to have a big impact and inspire others. Therefore, when we find ourselves in the pit, our job is to put our faith in God and put one foot in front of the other as we ascend (Isaiah 52:2). Likewise, when we finally find ourselves at the summit, be grateful and in awe as to how far we’ve come in and through Him.