Death Valley 2009
Week of March 22
Death Valley– the name evokes an appropriate Lenten theme. With places named Hell’s Gate, Devil’s Hole, Furnace Creek, and Devil’s Golf Course, Death Valley lives up to its long standing reputation as a place where sustaining life is treacherous. Scare water resources, blinding hot sun, hard, rocky, salty soil combine to make this a land of extremes, described as hottest, lowest, largest… a valley that would have fit right in with Ezekiel’s vision of a valley of dry bones.
At first glance all you might see is broken, torn rock, all you might feel is the piercing hot sun. You might think that the darkness of Lent is all there is here, but like many journeys in life, if you stop the car, sit for a while, wait for the sun to shift a bit, the landscape comes alive. Here in this place of extremes, were life is at its most difficult, God’s glorious creation is on radiant display.
Textures and colors woven into the very fabric of the land, from sculpted mountains to salt flat desert floor - it is as if the very struggle of life has produced the most brilliant canvas – it is as if the Lenten journey of pain and death and suffering is mirrored in the body of the land itself. Wildflowers, waiting dormant all year for the bit of rain that falls on the valley, rise up out of the dry dusty dirt, coloring the severe landscape, birthing the most brilliant post Easter canvas of our Creator.
Such is the journey of life – through our most severe trauma, our most intense struggle, people of the way hold on to the hope that this too will pass, that joy will come in the morning, that the struggle of the day is not the end of the story, that Good Friday is not the closing script, that the glory to be revealed is beyond imagination.
