And yet, and yet…

Several times in my life I’ve been on a hike out in the high places in the world, and stopped to wonder at the beauty. There’s something heart-achingly beautiful about the rocky places that wedge against the sky. What compounds this beauty is the remoteness of it. Many of these places are seen by less than a thousand people in a year. There’s something rare and precious there.

A thought that jumps to mind in these moments, “Isn’t this beauty wasted?” If beauty is found in the eye of the beholder, what of the hours and years that these vistas have gone unobserved?

And yet, beauty is beauty whether it’s observed by humanity or not. Ecclesiastes 3:11 reminds us that “God has made everything beautiful in its time; He has also placed eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” These remote mountain places would be beautiful even if they were never seen by human eyes. Why? Because the beauty of creation stands and in its existence performs its purpose.

Scripture is the same way. Sometimes people think that in order to derive meaning from the Bible, it has to be read and cogitated and philosophized over. Perhaps the beauty of application in the text is there whether we observe it or not. Perhaps our ability to discover the applications of the Bible is a grace that we don’t deserve.

Maybe these Heights are here without us.

And yet I rejoice to see them.