BitterSweetLife

There’s something striking about Moses, the guy God used to orchestrate the Exodus. It’s something I haven’t really thought about before: Despite the miraculous intersecting his world at every turn—a desert bush flowering with fire, water bursting out of solid rock, unleashed lightning dancing on mountaintops—Moses always wanted more. “Please, show me your glory!” (Exodus 33:18) he said to God at one point. But if anyone had seen God’s glory, it was Moses. The man was a glutton for glory, so long as it was God’s.

And thinking about it, Moses wasn’t the only one. There are others in The Book who display this strangely eerie tendency. David, the warrior-poet-king, displayed a similar soul psychosis, an abnormal fixation with the person of God. David met God in the wilderness, stumbled upon him in the heat of battle, wrote poems to God, lived as if this Lord was visible, tangible, nearby. And despite all this, he wrote lines saturated with desire. “One thing I’ve asked from God, that I will seek: a life lived out in the presence of God, every day of my life” (Psalm 27:4). Like Moses, David was a grasping man, grabbing up armloads, heartloads of the presence of God like shiny “ice.”

I think about people like this and the world seems to invert itself, if only for a moment. Like C.S. Lewis’ character, Ransom, I realize suddenly that the axis of life I consider normal—vertical, horizontal, the “straight” plain of the horizon—are in reality all out of alignment. To be standing “straight up” in regard to the universe, I would be positioned at a 45 degree angle to the floor.

The earth appears momentarily in its true shape—the shape that Moses and David and others discerned through mists of physicality—and it’s a miniature cosmos designed with one purpose in mind: the fullest possible display of God’s glory. The earth is meant to be seen through. And my fleeting realignment with earth’s ultimate purpose changes the “truth” of many things.

Greatness, for example, is different than I think. The great ones, I see, are those who take the world at face value and embrace its purpose. That many of them have been world-changers is secondary, almost incidental to their identity. A great person could live out her lifetime on a desert island, stranded, marooned—with God—and not lose an iota of her greatness. The tragedy would not be that her greatness had been lost, but that it had been lost to us.

Moses had mountaintop encounters with God. That’s where he caught the glory fever. David met God in a fiery back-country wilderness, out beyond the edges of the trail maps. Deep in the wilds, God seemed very real—because he was. But you had to open your eyes to see him.

These days, we live our lives in the shadows of a towering, snow-capped peak, a mountain that doesn’t just brush the sky but crowds it, and sometimes pokes through holes. But most of us don’t see it.

Some do. They look up and discover the heaven-scraping mountain next door. And then they blink and rub their eyes like crazy, because it turns out the vast mountain range is everywhere, and the one next door is just a foothill. We’re living in the foothills, and if we see them, they change us. Earth takes on sudden depth and height, swimming between the soaring towers of these peaks. True sight flickers to life, adjoined to glory. As Thomas Wolfe wrote,

Against the hidden other flanks of the immutable hills the world washed like a vast and shadowy sea, alive with the great fish of his imagining.

Once seen, these “immutable” borders are hard to forget. They burn a lasting image in the incorporeal retina. But they’re easily missed. And most of us do miss the mountains somehow, confused by the shadows they cast. We’re wandering through an art gallery, studying cracks in the marble pavement.

Occasionally though, someone looks up. Their names are Moses or David or something with similar resonance. They’re so startled by what they see that their lives lurch off the tracks of normality and never again get with the program.

How could they, when they stumbled on a soaring range of leviathan peaks and golden snowfields, shot translucent red, melting into blues and purples, shouting in the sunset: LOOK!

And by a dusty footpath at the hill next door, a sign reads, “Climb me.”


* Inspired by a message titled "Let Us Then Lift Up Our Eyes," John Vanderhorst, 1.23.2005