The mountains we see each morning in Almaty, Kazakhstan out of our living room and bedroom windows are amazing, as if they have a secret they have tucked away from our feasting eyes. They shift from white covered to blue to monochromatic blues with green vegetation in the foreground. The sky can be white clouds to match the snow or a different blue which offsets the white and blue. Eventually the snow peaks will be all gone once the summer heat sets in. In any case, we know that God’s fresh grace and peace reigns everlasting for us even though the mountains keep their secret with their shifting hues.
God ploughed one day with an earthquake,
And drove His furrows deep!
The huddling plains upstarted,
The hills were all aleap!But that is the mountains’ secret,
Age-hidden in their breast;
“God’s peace is everlasting,”
Are the dream-words of their rest.He made them the haunts of beauty,
The home elect of His grace;
He spreadeth His mornings upon them,
His sunsets light their face.His winds bring messages to them–
Wild storm-news from the main;
They sing it down the valleys
In the love-song of the rain.They are nurseries for young rivers,
Nests for His flying cloud,
Homesteads for new-born races,
Masterful, free and proud.The people of tired cities
Come up to their shrines and pray;
God freshens again within them,
As He passes by all day.And lo, I have caught their secret!
The beauty deeper than all!
This faith–that life’s hard moments,
When the jarring sorrows befall,Are but God ploughing His mountains;
And those mountains yet shall be
The source of His grace and freshness,
And His peace everlasting to me.William C. Gannett
