Too Big To Capture...

I have only been back from India for a couple of days now (awake this morning at 3:30AM, gulp), and there is one single image from Kalimpong which I cannot seem to erase from my memory.  It is the image of the third highest mountain in the world- Kanchenjunga (28,169 ft).  Just to give my fellow Coloradans some perspective, our highest mountains are half that size - 14ers (Pike's Peak - 14,115 ft)  Every morning in India I would wake up early to read my Bible, and there she was (I think mountains can still be referred to with a feminine pronoun, in our modern day of political correctness).  A mountain so big, she literally took my breath away.  I want to underline this.  Kanchenjunga was soo big I was breathless after casting my eyes upon her.  The mountain literally sucked the oxygen right out of my lungs.  Like the moment before you kiss a girl on prom night on the doorstep of her house, I was left breathless in her presence.  Like a powerful piece of music, or finishing an epic novel, or the arrival at an answer to a difficult math equation, I was breathless in Kanchenjunga's aura.   And so I tried to capture pictures of her.

I literally tried to take around 20 photographs of the mountain.  I attempted a photo from every angle.  From the airplane that landed in Bagdora I tried to take her picture.  To no avail.  The mountain looked like a tiny speck of a cloud.  No breathlessness.  I tried to capture the mountain from the balcony of the tiny rural, rough, hotel room where I was staying.  No effect.  I even drove up to the foot of Kanchenjunga and tried to take a picture as close away as a 49 miles from her base.  Nothing.  No power, no drama, no breathless feeling.  Again, the picture looked like a bad postcard at a freeway gas station.  Grant you, I was taking pictures of Kanchenjunga from my 5S I phone, but still, no powerful effect whatsoever.

What's the larger point I want to make here, for this week's blog post?

Some things are simply too big to capture!

It occurred to me that our God is also way too big to capture.  God, and God's glory, and God's son Jesus Christ, are WAY too big to capture in any which way.  Artists have tried for centuries to capture the magnitude and the multifacetedness of God in art.  Michaelangelo attempted to paint God touching the hand of Adam in his famous Sistine Chapel rendering, "The Creation of Adam."  Michalangelo's painting is great, but it does not capture God.  Leonardo Da Vinci's painting of, "The Last Supper," is an incredible rendering of the peace of the moment before the crucifixion of Christ, but it does not capture the scope of God.  Handel's "Messiah" is an entire symphony dedicated to the nature of God, but it does not capture all of God's facets.

And now I'm going to say something a little bit controversial.  Even the Bible does not capture the entire magnitude or scope or size of God.  The Bible is a 2,100 year epic depiction of God (Yahweh, Adonai, Messiah, Ruach, El-Shaddai, Son of God, Son of Man, Yeshua, Jesus), and yet it does not even begin to capture the entire scope and size of God.  The writers of the Bible, inspired by God Himself (Jeremiah, Isaiah, John Zebedee, John Mark, Matthew, Peter, Paul, Moses) must have stood back after writing their books and letters and said to themselves, "Gosh, that doesn't capture the entire scope or size or magnitude or beauty or power of God at all."

Some things are simply too big to capture!

All for Now,
GB