Loud

Five Minute Friday: Loud

If you drive through the valley and up the mountainside toward the old ghost town, there’s a place on the side of the road where you can stop and see the Cascades. If you pick your way down the hill and sit on the boulders, you can see the Chalk Creek tumbling its way down from the mountains.

The trees stand like sentinels. You begin to feel small as the peaks loom like giants above. Here the canyon rocks rise up jagged and huge, harsh, solid, unyielding.

And here as the creek rushes down to meet them, the waters roar.

You cannot sit unchallenged by the noise of this place. The Cascades drown everything in their thunder. The noise is a glad shout, the waters jubilant in their freedom and song, the rocks no match for their power. You can see where the stones have been smoothed by the continual singing of these waters.

In this place you can cry. You can wail and weep and rage, or you can laugh and sing. You can offer all your noise to the cascade and it receives you, pulling you in. You feel your own thoughts become part of the roar. Its song is your song.

The roar begins high, high above with a hundred trickling streams, springing from the cold ground, whispering their way down the mountainside until they join one another, linking songs, over and over. It begins when the frigid snows of winter melt and the mountains lose the bitterness that has bound them. The waters trickle, then rush, then leap down to the creek, which receives them gladly. Here is death turned to life, the frozen ache of winter transformed.

The river receives this gift, swells and swells with the joy of it. It races over the mighty rocks and pours down into the valley. When you sit there you feel the cry of your heart swept up and carried away by the force of all that life, all that singing power.

This could be us. His people. This could be church. This could be worship. All the small voices running together with their songs of hope and life and even sorrow and pain. We know death and rebirth (or we should). We know the freezing and thawing of winter (or we should). The slow small trickle of life after death could become a roar of power, a command to be heard and considered.

It’s time for us to be loud with our praise, mighty with our voice of hope. It’s time for the power of a million voices transformed by the glad life we have been given. We could be a noise to be reckoned with, in all the best ways.

“I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praise to my God while I have being.”

Psalm 104:33