What’s In A Name?

Head to southwest Colorado and you’ll find the San Juan Mountain range. A group of majestic peaks that are more jagged than other mountain ranges in Colorado. Home to some of the more difficult climbs for those looking to climb fourteeners. The mountains have some great names…Uncompahgre, Sneffels, Windom, Vestal, Twilight and Hesperus peaks just to name a few. I’m sure each has a story.

These peaks, while jagged and rugged, look like any other mountain range in Colorado. Vast expanse of gray granite, pockets of snow resisting the summer sun, trees that rise to a line where life becomes too much of a struggle to survive. In the middle of this typical photography shoot, the peaks pictured above rise as a complete anomaly to the rest of the landscape. Peaks that are inspiring, colorful, unique, divergent and make you live in a world that would like an explanation. Ironically the names of these two peaks are Red Mountain #1 and Red Mountain #2. WOW, what a let down! It sucked all the oxygen out of what was an already oxygen deprived location.

How does one go from Uncompahgre Peak to Red Mountain #__. All the creative people move out of town after the gray mountains were named? A name offers little in terms of really knowing. A last name might give you a heritage, or not. A name might seem to fit your preconceived notion of others you have known by the same name. In the end each of us is unique, and has something exceptional to offer as long as we don’t get tripped up by shallow things like names.

Back to Red Mountain#1, after years of visiting and living in the Rocky Mountains, seeing this place is stunning. The amount of color and the flow of it seems surreal. If I saw a painting of this without knowing of it’s location, I would never agree to it being real and assume someones creative skills were indeed…imaginative.

Well, Someones creative skills are imaginative and the world is a testimony to this. Sometimes I wonder why God throws a red mountain range here, a huge pile of sand there, petrified Redwood stumps between Colorado Springs and Buena Vista? Our world cries out of unimaginable beauty in vast and tiny scales. One could easily come to figure an artist with such great skill is required for such great work.

Some don’t believe in the artist, some use his name vainly. Others recognize great art for what it is and pay millions for a cherished piece. There’s more to a name, there’s more to His name. We’ve all been blessed by His handiwork. “The Heavens declare the Glory of God, the sky proclaims the work of his hand. Day after day it POURS FORTH speech and night after night it reveals knowledge.” Psalm 19 The reason it feels good to be out in nature is because we are enveloped in God’s art gallery, a place of wonder. Like the Clampett’s invitation… sit a spell, take your shoes off, ya’ll come back now hear!!

There’s more to God’s name that we could ever know. I pray that if you don’t know Him well or are estranged from Him, that His artwork would cause in you a desire to know the One who could do so well. What’s in a name… let’s discover!