Strolling down the sidewalk, walking away from our hotel in Colorado, we turn around to go back and there in front of us is a snow-covered Pike’s Peak, one of the tallest mountains in Colorado, surrounded by blue skies and little white puffs of clouds. The view takes my breath away and I quickly turn on my camera to photograph the scene, but no matter how many pictures I take zooming in and out, I can’t completely capture the majesty of the mountain. Driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains, we come up over a hill and there laid out before us is ridge after ridge of mountains in various shades of smoky blue. Once again, I grab my camera, but just can’t get the wonder of God’s creation into a single picture regardless of how hard I try. Walking along the beach with huge waves crashing against the shore, I try once again to frame the panorama of the shore in my camera, but there is no way to totally get it all in the picture – the rolling of the waves as they break, the foam sliding up the sandy shore, the water slipping back home to the seam, the variety of greens, blues and browns, the hermit crab skittering across the hard packed sand, the giggles of children playing in the water. I can get individual pictures of various aspects of the scene, but they are all two dimensional snapshots of a moment that fall short of the glory surrounding me.

The hymns on my MP3 are resonating in my head and I suddenly realize, our view of God is like a bunch of photographs each capturing only a small part of the total majesty of Him, limited in dimensions and senses. We can’t experience the full magnificence of God this side of heaven and maybe we won’t even be able to in heaven, either, since He is infinite in his glory. Even Moses was only allowed to see a part of God’s glory as God passed by (Ex 33:20-23). Yet what we see of him still takes our breath away, so how much more amazing he must be in His fullness of glory.

The song “I Can Only Imagine” comes to mind and I wonder what will my reaction be when I finally see God – breathless amazement. The other thought that comes to me is thankfulness and awe at how God created our senses. Our eyes can take in a full scene like these and take it all in within a second. Our eyes focus in and out to get every detail while a man-made lens has many limitations. God gave us several ways to experience the scene in addition to our eyes which is part of why you can’t capture the moment totally with pictures: the sounds of the waves, the birds, the wind, or water babbling in a brook or even the silence; the smells of beach, mountain flowers, pine trees, or the forest floor; the feeling of the sun, the breeze, the water spray, the coolness of the waves on your feet are all part of the scene we can’t capture. As we read our Bible, pray, participate in worship, or enjoy the glory of God’s creation, we are getting snapshots of God; but we need to realize that as wonderful as these glimpses are, there is so much more to God that we aren’t able to experience that will be even more breath-taking.