There are still places
where man has not yet managed
to make himself the center of everything.
No pavement.
No steeple.
No microphone.
Just mountains rising out of the earth
like they have been standing watch
since before anyone thought to name them.
A river working its way through stone
long before anyone was there to watch it.
Tundra turning gold in the early cold.
Snow gathering on peaks
no hand has ever shaped.
Then the sun drops behind the range
and sets the whole sky on fire.
Another day,
a rainbow stretches across miles of Alaska
with nobody there to improve it.
That may be the humbling part.
None of it needs us.
The mountain does not care who you are.
The river does not know your résumé.
The wilderness has no interest
in the little kingdoms we spend our lives building.
The titles.
The corner offices.
The names on the door.
You stand there long enough
and something begins to shrink.
Hopefully it is you.
Weybo went into that country
after the fourteenth of the North American 29.
The Dall sheep had been the thirteenth.
This time it was the Alaska-Yukon moose,
the largest member of the deer family on earth.
A long way from Baker County.
A long way from the courthouse,
the flat fields,
the heat that hangs on into fall.
He walked forty miles in eight days.
Calling.
Listening.
Calling again.
Eating berries where he found them
and rations he had put together
before he ever left home.
For eight days
the wild said very little back.
On the eighth day of ten,
with the hunt nearly spent,
the bull answered.
Fifty inches is the mark for a big bull.
This one went sixty-eight,
carrying paddles
wider than his own body.
One shot.
Two hundred eighty-eight yards.
And the valley went quiet.
Sixty-eight inches will go in the book.
That may not be the part
that stays with a man.
Because somewhere between the valleys,
the weather,
and the distance,
the caller becomes the one being called.
Not by an animal.
By creation itself.
Paul wrote that the invisible things of God
are clearly seen
in the things that are made.
So that we are without excuse.
He did not mean it as a compliment.
He meant it as a verdict.
Nobody gets to say
they were never told.
The sermon has been hanging over every ridge
since the first morning.
Maybe that is why the wilderness feels holy.
Not because God lives there
more than anywhere else.
He is just as near
over a peanut field in Baker County
as over any mountain in Alaska.
The difference is
there is less of us out there
to block the view.
And here is the mercy in it.
Being small is not the punishment.
It is the relief.
Nothing out there
was ever waiting on you
to hold it up.
The wild has been preaching
since the beginning.
It never raised its voice.
It never passed a plate.
It simply kept telling the truth
until a man from southwest Georgia,
eight days into calling out,
got quiet enough
to hear what had been calling him.
“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.”
Romans 1:20
Boutwell Jones
Red Clay Gospel
