Of Mountains and Forever

They say that the mountains of the East are far older than the mountains of the West and at one time were just as lofty.  Over ages and ages the Appalachian Mountains have been worn down by wind and rain and the other engines of change, their substance contributing to much of the land on which many of the people of the southeastern United States today live and where generations before them cleared the land, built their homes, and at length departed. 

The sugary white beach sands of Florida’s Emerald Coast are said to be uncountable grains of quartz eroded from the mountains far to the north.  The cities of Wilmington, Delaware; Baltimore, Maryland; Washington, D.C.; Richmond, Virginia; Raleigh, North Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; Macon, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama; and numerous others are outposts along the “Fall Line” of the eastern seaboard, marking where the ocean once met the land and where eons later waterfalls and rapids set the limit that colonial ships could travel up the rivers.  All of the land between these cities and today’s coast was created from the rocks of the timelessly ancient Appalachians.

And yet these mountains are still majestic for all of that wear and tear.  The clouds ever cling to the Smoky Mountains, while in Virginia, as the Blue Ridge, the mountains rise as the rocky fence that for the early colonists divided the new land between what they called east and west. 

I recently spent a week in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, on the western side of the Smokies.  In the morning the view of Mt. LeConte and other towering peaks greeted me, and at night they fed evening reverie. 

Each evening of the week the family gathered for a devotional on a wide porch with that marvelous view as our backdrop.  Each adult family member, often helped by a younger participant, took a turn leading us in song, prayer, scripture study, and a spiritual message.  Spiritual thoughts came easy in that setting.  On one evening in full twilight I called upon the setting for my visual aid.

The mountains of the East are distinguished by being blanketed in forest framing the occasional meadow, with very infrequent exposed rock.  I drew attention to the forest covering, noting that among the woodland growth there were a fair number of trees shorn of every leaf—long dead.  I remarked that all of the living trees that we saw would die in turn, and that the mountains themselves were steadily disappearing, imperceptibly wearing away.  We live in a world that of itself is a world of steady decay, with no earthly exceptions.

And then the point of the message (with little ones in attendance you have to reach the point soon enough):  each one of us is older than the mountains before us.  Our Heavenly Father told us long before time all about this world and His plan for us here while we lived in His presence in His eternal home that preexisted the earth.  From that eternal world we were sent to a world where all was change and where decay prevailed.  This temporary world is our learning, growing, and testing ground, where we have full freedom to choose who and what we want to become.      

Into this world of death and decay Jesus Christ was sent by His Father and our Father to redeem every good thing, including (most of all) those who would choose to rely upon His power and grace to become good and be brought back into the eternal worlds of the Father’s presence.  All good, all beauty, all loveliness of this world would be saved by Christ and amplified where moth and rust do not corrupt.  That was the power that Christ the Redeemer won by His atoning sacrifice.  As beautiful and great as the view before us, Christ came that we might rise above and lay claim forever to it all, losing nothing worth keeping.  Most of all, that included especially all of us gathered on that porch and our eternal relationship as family.

And that was the lesson of the mountains and the forests before us, presented in fewer words.  But the truth of the message lingers and will not wear away.