Gorkha: a remote mountain village 5 hours away from the capital city of Kathmandu. After a harrowing bus ride along the edges of the bumpy mountain roads, listening to Ed Sheeran for hours on end (apparently Nepal just really likes Ed Sheeran? Who knew, right? I probably heard “Shape of You” almost 50 times during the month!) we climbed through the heavy fog to emerge into the village where the rest of Gresom’s family lived.
Unloading our week bags, we climbed 77 steep stone steps (you better believe I counted those) to reach the church we’d been blessed to have been given to stay and settled our stuff before climbing back down to go and meet Mama and Gresha for the first time.
After our first meeting and dinner at their house, we went back to the church to fall into a heavy sleep after the tiring travel.
The first three days I woke up and walked outside to brush my teeth with my water bottle, I admired the sight of the low clouds/fog hiding all but the tips of the mountains surrounding the one Gorkha was perched on. I thought to myself, “wow, I am literally above the clouds right now.” It was really humbling, beyond cool to see, and definitely not ever something I thought I’d see in my lifetime.
But I woke up the third morning oddly early to the quiet and muffled gasps of Elizabeth Medina. She’s always up at ungodly hours, so I wasn’t surprised that she was awake, but I was surprised to wake up. She’s usually quiet, because she’s praying and journal and reading her Bible, so I was confused as to why I had awoken to noise.
My writer’s curiosity and incessant need to know everything going on around me urged me from my sleeping bag to stumble blearily outside, rubbing my eyes and whispering a question to why exactly Elizabeth was gasping.
I looked up, and I stopped dead in my tracks.
I rubbed my eyes again, sure I’d gotten something in my eye. But when I blinked rapidly to clear my vision, the white spots in the sky had remained.
There, in the far distance, were white-tipped mountains peering out of the disappearing sky. My jaw dropped. I gasped loudly (those of you who have watched movies with me, y’all know the volume of my gasps, so you won’t be surprised at hearing that Elizabeth immediately shushed me because people were still sleeping, and I sheepishly apologized, still staring gobsmacked into the distance).
Gresom walked outside to see my shocked face, and laughed quietly. He explained it had actually been pretty cloudy recently, and that this morning was the first day that it had been clear enough to see the ‘mountains’ surrounding us (still insisting what I thought were mountains were simply hills. Staring slack-jawed at the white tips in front of me, I couldn’t help but nod in dumbstruck agreement. These were mountains). I still couldn’t believe my eyes.
Me with my silly American ‘mountain’ knowledge had thought (ridiculously) to myself, that with mountains being so high and all, you’d obviously be able to see them from far away and all the time. But it’s actually hard to see sometimes if it’s not a clear day, since there’s so much distance and air between your eyes and the mountain itself, but the fact that we can still see them from so far away just hammers in just how big they are, because they are JUST THAT FREAKING TALL.
WHAT EVEN.
And I just stood there, thinking about the scale of those mountains, and how they were tiny ridges on the surface of the Earth, and that Earth is dwarfed by the star in our own solar system much less all those outside of it (if you guys have seen the Luis Giglio “How Great is Our God” video, that’s what I’m talking about, what I kept flashing back to. And if you haven’t seen it, go look it up right now and watch it. I won’t even be mad that you didn’t finish my blog before watching it. I’m not joking, go look it up right now, if you don’t have time to watch the entire thing then watch the ten minute version, but the longer one is worth the while I swear on my life, and I guarantee it will change how you view the BIGNESS of God. Go on now, skedaddle y’all! Hustle it up!). And the verse about God simply breathing out the stars kept running through my head.
I was on the high places (Habbakuk 3:19). I was standing in the kingdom of love, the kingdom of God.
Someone once told me that the mountains and the valleys between them are the fingerprint left behind by God when he shaped the Earth. Which, I think is an apt description and the closest I’ll ever probably be able to get when imagining the vastness of God and His majesty, but the fact that even that analogy is too small for God. It utterly blows my mind.
Gorkha and those white-tipped mountains took the realization of God’s majesty and wonder and slammed them into my soul like a eighteen-wheeler. It was humbling. It was awe-inspiring. It was fear-inducing (the good kind).
And it was a blessing of the highest order. For God to grant me even a smidgen of the perspective to view just how Big, how Great, how Awesome, how Majestic, and how Wondrous He truly is, was nothing short of a blessing I didn’t deserve, and one I will be thankful for for the rest of this life and the next.
Thank. You. God.
