What I did on my summer vacation

I spent July driving from Washington State to San Antonio and back to see our youngest child graduate from Air Force Basic Training. We traveled four hours a day, and took a lot of do-nothing days. I did physical therapy morning and evening, napped in the middle of the day, and used supplemental oxygen as necessary. It was a good trip.

We stuck to the blue highways, camping mainly in primitive campgrounds, or off the road in the middle of nowhere. We visited a few famous places:

Tsé Bitʼaʼí (“Rock with Wings”) or Shiprock, on the land of the Navajo Nation near Shiprock, New Mexico (Bowie Snodgrass, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

The intrepid explorer Chupacabra Jack discovers the Grand Canyon

But mainly on back highways you go through lots of open space and tiny towns, some barely scraping by, some not, a few that look trim and well-fed.

We bought half a pound of pecan praline penuche (“famous since 1934”) at a store on U.S. 285 in Clines Corners, New Mexico, and visited Billy the Kid’s grave in Fort Sumner.

We ate chopped brisket sandwiches mesquite smoked for 20 hours at The Wagon in Post, Texas.

At the Texas border we met flies that fought us in gangs for our food as we ate it, ants that got into everything, and three-digit heat.

Camping for days in the weeds without air conditioning helped me think about the Holy Spirit. The Hebrew word translated spirit—ruahkh—means, equally, spirit, breath, and wind. And wind as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit runs through Scripture from Genesis on. I’ve thought of that mainly in terms of power, of energy: wind for your sails, as it were. But in the desert, when it’s 106 with 85% humidity, even the tiniest breeze is soooo refreshing. You can’t predict when it will come, you can’t make it come, but when it does come, it’s wonderful. 

Come, Holy Spirit.

* * *

After our son’s coin ceremony and graduation, we got him for 18 hours before he shipped out to his next school. We got takeout at a tiny, brightly-painted restaurant and ate under big, old trees at the nearby San Juan Capistrano Mission. It was the first time in eight weeks, he said, that he’d gotten to eat till he was full.

Fire-roasted peppers—five kinds!—in the molcajete, and whole onions in the skins

An active congregation since 1731, San Juan Capistrano counts descendants of original Spanish and Indian parishioners among its current parishioners.

* * *

One of my favorite parts of the journey was the mountain ranges: the Guadalupe in Texas, Wasatch in Utah, Superstitions in Arizona, Sacramento in New Mexico, the Vermillion Cliffs in Arizona.

We shared a deserted campground in Guadalupe Mountains National Park (Texas), with scorpions, tarantula hawks (wasps bigger than hummingbirds that hunt tarantulas), and female whiptail lizards (I know they were females because there are no males--whiptails reproduce by cloning).

We camped at the bottom of a steep and narrow gravel road in the Dolores River Canyon  (Colorado). After supper we sat in the river and caught crawdads.

In the deep silence, I watched the mountains change colors as the sun crossed the sky. And I kept seeing in my mind’s eye people who had been there before me. In the Guadalupe Mountains, Mescalero Apache hunters making their way noiselessly across a ridge in the middle distance.

In the Dolores River Canyon, early European explorers in hats and boots, clambering over the rocks, calling to each other. Ute or Navajo women going down to the water, talking quietly. The canyon would have looked virtually the same to Anasazi a thousand years ago as it did to me.  

I’ve been praying Psalm 90 this summer. It contemplates God’s vastness in time—

A thousand years in your sight

are as yesterday when it is past

or as a watch in the night

—and our time-frailty:

As for the days of our years, their span is seventy years,

But if we stay strong, perhaps eighty.

It’s full of time words: generation, before, everlasting, yesterday, watch in the night, morning, evening, time, and, over and over, days and years. 

It begins, Lord, You have been our refuge in all generations. We could paraphrase that very truly, I think, as, You have been our refuge in time. 

We can’t escape from time. We experience its ravages:

In the morning let him blossom. . . .

In the evening let him . . . be dried up and withered.

But, the psalm says, the timeless God is our safe place in the overwhelming river of time.  

It ends:

Let the favor [kindness, delightfulness, beauty] of the Lord our God be upon us. . . .

It’s hard, being one among seven billion. We want to be special. Not lost in the crowd. We want someone’s face to light up when they see us. Favor: we want to be someone’s favorite person.

I saw a woman once wearing a baseball cap that said Jesus Loves Me Best. I thought at first that she was making fun of American Christianity. I think now that she was a profound theologian. Each of my five kids is, truly, my favorite. When I’m thinking of that child, I love her/him best of all. And if my cramped heart can manage that, God’s heart certainly can. 

Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,

And give permanence to the work of our hands—

Yes, give permanence to the work of our hands.

Jesus says, Apart from Me you can do nothing. I puzzled over that in my twenties. Clearly I could do all sorts of things. At 60, it’s easy to see that Jesus just spoke the plain truth. In a hundred years, all the sound and fury of my life will be like an intricate sandcastle after high tide. 

But the promise of the Christian Scriptures is that the work of our hands can, in fact, outlast time. That what we do can matter.

In Psalm 90, it’s a prayer, one I’ve prayed for years. But Jesus turns it into a promise. I chose you, He says, and appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that remains. He invites us to build things in time, frail things, that will, if we build with Him, survive time: our selves, for example. Our love relationships: with Him, and with each other. The truth we speak, the beauty we co-create.

Lord, You have been our refuge in all generations. . . . You are our refuge in time.

Grace to you, and peace,

Carolyn