“How much further to Boulder, Colorado?” I asked the desk clerk as Kathleen and I were checking in to our motel at Rock Springs, Wyoming during our recent vacation.
"Not really sure…should be no more than 5 to 10
hours” she replied. I was surprised to hear this since: that’s quite a wide
range; and, Interstate 80 is a preferred route into Boulder, and Rock Springs
is along the way. (To her credit, she did offer to Google it).
At dinner we also asked our server who didn’t know
either. Both had spent their entire lives in Rock Springs, which is one of only
a handful of communities along Interstate 80 as it stretches over 300 miles
through southern Wyoming. Everything they knew about life came from this one
pocket of existence.
Kathleen and I talked about this as we drove through
those open spaces; the vastness went as far as our eyes could see. I held this
image in contrast with our daughter Allison’s neighborhood in Philadelphia;
there you see streets bordered by sidewalks on both sides with row houses starting at the
edge of the sidewalk jammed in side by side and that’s all that you can see for
blocks and blocks and blocks.
We wondered: what would it be like to suddenly drop the
Rock Springs motel clerk into that Philadelphia neighborhood, and vice-versa;
taking somebody there and put them in that southern Wyoming hugeness.
And then, if we were to bring them together after 30
days; what did one view as common and the other as surprising? What would
prompt shared feelings? How might there be some very different impressions from
the same experience?
Our life’s history forms the lens for the way we view
things. This is good for us to keep in mind as we keep growing here at PPC;
that while we all look to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the foundation of our faith –
each of us looks through our own lens which means we likely focus on different
aspects of Jesus, and we might even see things differently.
And that only as a community can we best see the fullness
that Jesus Christ has to offer.
Together We Serve, Pastor Mike
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