Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?  I went as a little girl.  I haven’t been since.  But I’ve seen photos of it.  It’s pretty awesome.  But it’s very scary too.

It’s this long, deep gouge in the earth. Brown. A lot of different colors of browns and oranges and some dark reds…but it’s mostly just…brown.  And the sides are sheer. They just go straight down.

It’s pretty scary, really.  I mean, compared to the things we are used to, like houses only so many square feet and cars with seats that fit our bodies and supermarkets with aisles that allow two people to pass by each other and shelves that can be reached by average sized people and theater seats that a normal body can sink into…well, the Grand Canyon is a pretty scary thing.

I wouldn’t want to fall into it.  It wouldn’t fit me very well.  And it would be a long fall.  And I don’t think I would fair very well once I hit the bottom.

Big things are freaky.

I remember the day that my family stood in the path that the lava from Mt. St. Helen’s made 25 years ago.  Things were starting to grow there, but basically there was forest on either side of the wide almost mile long path, but not much in between.

And we stood under this huge rock called a mountain, with the side of it blown out, and little puffs of steam hanging over the top of it.  It was so huge, it looked like the mountain was right on top of us, but in reality it would have taken us some hours of walking to get to the base of the thing.

I was dizzy just standing there.  And though there was no danger of the thing blowing, I was frightened for my children.  It was too awesome for me.  I was too small.

Not too long ago my family took a trip that included driving down the Columbia Gorge.  Wow, what a beautiful gorge. Beautiful river.  We saw a small herd of mountain goats walking the side of the gorge, and lovely, long waterfalls, and huge barges with happy faces painted on the side of them.

Then suddenly, the gorge went from beautiful and entertaining to huge and frightening.  It was just so…great.  The water was deep and wide. The sides of the gorge were sheer and devoid of much green because of the intense winds that commonly sweep down the length of the gorge.  I looked across the water and saw the other side of the gorge, the walls steep and brown. And I saw semi trucks that looked tinier than my smallest fingernail, so minute as to be ants climbing the side of a great house.

I gripped the armrests on my seat. I tried to catch my breath and breathe normally. This was too big.  This was too much.  It was beautiful and awesome, yes.  But much, much too big for me.

Once, when Joshua was about 9 years old, we were driving at night under a full moon.  We were talking about how far it was to the moon, and about distances, and how distances are really relative according to our practical experiences, because thousands of miles straight up will never make the same sense that thousands of miles across land in a car would.

We were trying to make sense of the distance between us and the moon, and all of a sudden Joshua grabbed his seat and said, “I’m dizzy, Mom!”  At that same instance, my head had begun whirling and I slowed the car down to a crawl so I could control it. 

It was too big for us.  We both felt the dizziness of incomprehension, the weightlessness of being in the presence of something too huge.

God loves sparrows. He knows when each one falls. He knows all of them. Every one of them. From the beginning of time, He’s counted sparrows. He taught them to make nests and raise young and find food, and when each one of them dies, He recognizes it. He sees it. He makes note of it.

Sparrows are small and pretty insignificant.  God is not small and far from insignificant.  God is bigger than the Grand Canyon, wilder than the Columbia Gorge, more devastating that a volcanic mountain.

God loves me.

This is too huge for me to comprehend.  I believe the words.  I know God doesn’t lie.  But falling into His love is like falling into the Grand Canyon.  It doesn’t fit me. It’s scary.  I don’t understand. It doesn’t fit into my world.

But, well, where else am I going to fall when I’ve been pushed to the edge of a canyon and my foot has felt the earth begin to crumble underneath me?

I like safe love. It fits me well and I can do it and I can receive it and, well, it feels good.

God’s love is not safe. Even though it’s the only safe place to be.