Truly I never thought I'd ever find a place so fitting for my soul. As I visited countries and drove to different states, meeting new people in new places I never thought I'd find my heart able to grow attached to a place as I have with a certain mountain-y state called Colorado.
I am approaching my fourth move to Colorado. Yes, that is fourth, as in 1, 2, 3, 4. I visited, I returned with a job, then I returned without a job, then I returned again for fun and found myself with a job and a home and a community and a whole lot of love. Every time I return since I moved away last I am surprised by my reaction when I get back to Colorado. I am surprised at how fitting it all seems, and how comfortable I suddenly am. Here in the Midwest I forget that I am surrounded by communities, GREAT communities at that, but communities that I don't quite jive with or fit into quite as well as I'd like, or quite as well as the people around me do. No matter which friend group I find myself with here I am the oddball. I am okay with that. I am comfortable with that, but I forget how tiresome it can be when I'm back in those mountains and hugging the people in the places that I have been deeply missing for the last year and a half.
I woke up in the mountains this week to a grandiose view of the biggest mountains in Rocky Mountain National Park; I was reminded of God's bigness, and Gods creativity. It's something I've slowly been forgetting here. It's harder to see that creativity in prairie grass and skyscrapers. I search for it within the confines of how good or bad I feel like I am doing on a personal level because that's all I can see here, and that hasn't been such a great place for me to search for Gods bigness, because that's just a small iota of where His hand extends. The mountains remind me that God has His big ol' hands in all of it. They bring me outside of myself and my worries and the perfections and standards I seem to set for myself.
Being in Colorado this last weekend has made me think a lot about the culture of the Midwest and why it is the way it is. We have few things out here that remind us that there is a bigness around us that surpasses what we can see and plan. It then becomes so easy to place so much more value on things that really don't need such heaviness placed upon them. Here we have careers that guide our lives. In the mountains they have lifestyles that guide their lives.
I have been wrestling with why these cultures are so different. Is it place that makes them so different? Is it merely landscape? If we just switched the people in the mountains with the people in the Midwest would their lifestyles change at all? That almost seems to simplistic. Or is there something deeply ingrained in each of us differently, causing us to migrate the way we do nowadays, I to the mountains, and some to the cities.
How does this all work? And how can I convince everyone I love to fall in love with those mountains just as I have so that I can bring them all with me when I settle there forever?
Heaven has those mountains, right? The grass is blue and the mountains are huge.
(That was indeed a reference to there being bluegrass in heaven. There damn well better be.)
