Up the Sunbeam

-- -- Most mountaintops are thin places for me.  If you asked me what God smells like, I would tell you He smells of pungent pine and crisp, snow-chilled mountain air.  His power is in the wild wind , His whisper in the flowers-in-miniature that grow, impossible, on top of the world. I have known thin places on horseback, in basketball games, in babies’ first smiles and at rock concerts—God comes close to play and breathe and cheer and celebrate with us. I have known thin places in the depths of heartache too . . . . . . At 17 when twice in one year I dealt with the death of someone close who was too young to die—thin places to be sure, where God taught me to sing through the darkness, that the only way through is through . . . To read the rest of my story, come with me over to Mary DeMuth's site where I am honored to offer this as a guest post for her Thin Places series! Mary is an insightful and prolific author whose work I have come to admire so much! Her own...

-- Standing atop the very spine of North America, the Continental Divide, I drink in the majesty of what for me, is an always-place.  This view, these rocks, this air runs through my life like a favorite melody that recurs again and again in a movie soundtrack.  It's a place I always seem to go back to, a place I never get tired of, a place I miss deeply when I'm far away. High places are always like that for me. I have never met a mountain I didn't love --the higher and more jagged and snow-covered, the better.  Shimmering with an unearthly glory, mountains are rife with evidence of an all-powerful and monumentally grand Creator-God . I am only one of the more than 3 million people who visit these mountains in a year.  Whether they know it or not . . . whether they recognize Him or not . . . each and every one, in some way, feels God on those heights. Ancient people felt God's presence on high places too. Sadly, though they felt Him on peaks and high mou...

-- As a little girl, there were few things I loved as much as trips to the mountains . My folks would pack up our Volkswagen and we would leave the verdant corn fields of the fertile Iowa plains in pursuit of the wilder beauty of the Rocky Mountains. Some of our biggest dreams, God-sized dreams, were born there. We would camp among the towering trees of National Forests and make hot chocolate and S'mores at our evening campfire. At dawn, my Iowa farm-girl mom was already up, cooking scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast--there is nothing like the smell of sizzling bacon blended with the heady fragrance of pine trees and morning-crisp mountain air! Oh! Take me back!! Our days would find us in our intrepid Volkswagen, Daddy driving, treating the little red bug like a jeep or a mountain goat depending on the quality of the road that had caught our fancy. The place s we went!! The things we saw!! The rarefied air we breathed!! "No clan on earth possesses the memories that...

-- In 1903, a group of fa rmers built an earthen dam across Roaring River at the mouth of Lawn Lake high in the mountains above the ir farms near Loveland, Colorado. The dam was approximately 35 miles away, almost 11,000 feet above se a level, and nearly 6000 feet above the valley floor. This reservoir of water enabled the m to irrigate their crops, and it enlarged and enhanced already beautiful Lawn Lake. For years the dam did its job and the farmers enjoyed the benefit of having a ready supply of water for their land. Fast-forward to the morning of July 15th, 1982. Early that bright, sunny morning, th e dam broke , sending the water behind it rushing downstream at an estima te d 18,000 cubic feet per second. Gathering trees and boulders in its crashing current, the cascade reached and overwhelmed another dam at Crystal Lake, causing it to fail too. The normal courses of Roaring River and Fall River below it were dwarfed by the new channels cut by the 25-foot high, 100-...