Mountains and Valleys
Laying on a cot on a Sunday morning at the church’s periodic blood drive, I looked up and found that I was resting between two large paintings. One depicts a sunny garden wedding celebration and the other a gray deathbed scene. As I looked at the two paintings, the portable stereo brought by the technicians from the blood bank was playing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”
The song is a love anthem from 1970 with Diana Ross belting out the chorus with its less-than-poetic grammar:
Ain’t no mountain high enough,
Ain’t no valley low enough,
Ain’t no river wide enough,
To keep me from you.
Pop lyrics for sure, and if there wasn’t a tube hanging out of my arm, I might have raised my hands and swayed. But as I listened to the song about mountains and valleys, while viewing those scenes of joy and sorrow, I was reminded of Paul’s more poetic words from the Book of Romans: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
In the past ten years I’ve lived in both those painted scenes. I’ve hung my head in the sorrowful valley, and I’ve stood on the mountaintop hand-in-hand with new love. In fact, when LeAnn and I had our wedding rehearsal luncheon a few years ago, it was in that room with those paintings as the backdrop.
It’s been valleys and mountains, demons and angels, death and life. But the truth is that most of us spend most of our days on the slopes and terraces between the mountains and valleys, the celebrations and the sorrow. We’re on our way up or on our way down.
Or, we’re resting on a ledge trying to map out the next part of the journey with the mountaintop our preferred destination. These places of rest and preparation are also depicted in paintings in that same room: a family dedication, a baptism. But the largest painting encompasses both pop song lyrics and Paul’s letter of hope. It is a scene of a Lord’s Supper table, with people of all ages gathered before the bread and the cup representing God’s gift through Christ’s sacrifice.
That scene is God’s love song to us – God’s assurance that nothing can separate us from his love. It is our resting place between the mountains and valleys, the angels and demons. It is where we stand between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, and if we’re willing, every day of our life.