Following my trip to Los Angeles last fall for the senior living conference, I found myself looking out the window of my plane as I traveled the first leg of my journey home. With a layover in Denver, we were flying over the Rocky Mountains, and I began to see the rugged terrain unfolding far beneath us. The rivers and land, much of it uninhabitable by more than a few people, danced their rugged, jagged dance revealing the millennia of rise and fall that comes from far below the earth’s surface.

As I looked, I realized too that I was looking at mountains that are tall and majestic. They are beautiful and awe-inspiring when looked at from below. Yet from the air, while they are still pretty, they do not hold the same spell over me that they do when I stand at their feet or view the world from their summits. The magic is only there when I get below them and position myself in such a way that they are mountains and I am merely me.

Perhaps that is what happens with God. How often do I want to get a handle on God? To get above God? How often do I proclaim to so clearly understand Christ and what Christ wants for us that the transcendence of this triune God escapes me? When I “fly too high” the magic is no longer there.

In ancient courts (and still, I suppose, even with some contemporary monarchs), when subjects would enter the presence of royalty, they were required to bow low so as to be beneath the eye level of the monarch. In such a position, the subject certainly understands what majesty is all about. The awe and wonder of being in the presence of “majesty” is reinforced by our position.

So my journey is back once again to the foot of the cross. It is to the feet of our savior who teaches us about God. It is back into the temple of God where the awe and wonder of being in God’s presence reminds us that, in fact, we are in the presence of a majestic, powerful God who invites us to view the world, not as though we are above God, but as those who have been invited to the summit to glimpse a world through the eyes of it’s creator.

Majesty. Awe. Wonder. Not to control or climb above. It is enough to sit at the feet of Jesus.