God Turns Fears into Peace

Today’s reading: Psalm 121

I remember driving through a long stretch of flat land in Colorado, occasionally gazing at the mountains floating amidst the clouds dozens of miles to my right. It was a glorious, peaceful scene, that I wished would never end.

Then suddenly the historic Raton Pass mountains emerged directly in front of me as I approached the city of Trinidad on the state’s border with New Mexico.

It was terrifying.

The land seemed to burst from the ground to gobble up my car like some subterranean giant monster violently waking from a slumber and now clamoring for a snack. The road became suddenly chaotic, a constant struggle with frightening twists around steep cliffs that were the opposite of beautiful.

I kept my cell phone in site throughout. I thought a  heart attack was eminent

I finally escaped this hell after some 20 minutes, though it seemed  much longer. (When I noticed how short of a time it had been, I wondered if I had not been pulled through some sort of evil time warp, the way people have reported in their encounters with space aliens.) I was as relieved as I ever have been to finally pull into a gas station on flat, calm land in Raton, New Mexico.

I found there some brochures about the Raton Pass, and today’s reading brings that literature back to mind.

I learned that those mountains I had just driven through had been thought of for centuries as the easiest route through the Rocky Mountains for traveling between  the mid-American plains and New Mexico.  The path through the range was an important part of the famed Santa Fe Trail by which much commerce in our nation’s early history passed. Thousands of heroic travelers had made it across those mountains.

But, I was astounded to discover that my twenty minute journey usually took months on foot. And that was the entire reason the towns of Trinidad and Raton had been born: cowboys needed a place to stay for a few weeks to rest and gather supplies (and probably the nerve) for their adventures across those mountains.

Recalling all of this, the first line of today’s Psalm becomes staggering: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.”

As you can tell, I’m a novice when it comes to mountains. I’ve lived on the flat Gulf Coast of Texas for most of my life.

But I imagine that Biblical era travelers coming across the desert to Jerusalem, through the mountains just outside of town, faced something just as harrowing as The Raton Pass.  (Maybe more so, since there was, apparently, no welcoming place to rest-up from the long trip across the desert just before plunging into the hills.)

That anyone who made that journey could turn back to those hills with positive thoughts is an amazing inspiration.

If I lived in Trinidad, Colorado, I’m confident my thoughts would mostly be to the North. I would do all I could to avoid driving south across that treacherous  pass. Likewise, if I lived in Raton, New Mexico, I would avoid even the thought of traveling into Colorado.

And, if I had traveled (on foot!) across a similarly frightening bunch of hills to reach Jerusalem, I’m sure my instincts would rouse fear, not hope, as I gazed upon those hills from the city.

But the psalmist does find great hope in those hills! He reminds himself, and all of us, that God is in those hills. And nothing can be more comforting than that.

Thanks be to God for His eternal presence — even in the most terrifying of places.