BitterSweetLife

© 2004 Arielinds Photography

In the third week of May ‘04, we took a group of college-age friends to the Grand Canyon. Our stated goal was to build friendships in a setting where Christ’s glory made regular appearances, so striking you could hardly miss it. We wanted to catch a vision for Jesus’ glory, and we did. But the greater challenge was to take that vision home, and keep pursuing it in our Kansas City, MO locale. We had to swap the clifftop experience for muddy lowland and still find wonder. Glory in the grind.

Below you’ll find a short photo documentary of that trip, mostly posted for fun, and with no real explanations—other than rather juvenile titles and captions that may be mildly amusing if you weren’t there. But there is something BitterSweet about all this. And while bittersweetness is better shown (grasped intuitively at first) than told (“figured out” mentally), and I try to keep categorical statements to a minimum, some explanation is called for. But, as usual, it will be truth told “slant.”

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise.

Sociopath though she was, Emily Dickinson was on to something here. So here’s a slim line on Grand Canyon bittersweetness:


Beyond the Canyon
May 25, 2004

I survey the Grand Canyon,
out and over and in,
the earth rolled back,
the earth pushed aside.
I see it all clearly,
what I’ve never seen before.

An undying longing wells inside me,
and I enter the Canyon,
descend through its layers,
soak in sun and wind and water,
all the eye can see,
and I walk back up.

But I still haven’t found
the source of my bittersweet pangs,
the well of hope in my heart.
The Canyon makes it spring up and run out,
but it’s not in the Canyon.
So where does it spring from?

What did I hope to see?
What did I hope to find?
How will I be satisfied?


Job: “Behold, these are but the fringes of His ways…how faint a word we hear of Him.”