A God Bigger Than West Texas—And Close to Me

Going to Big Bend National Park in West Texas has long been on my bucket list. As a native Texan I feel like I should’ve checked it off before now, but it is remote! In fact, I learned that though Big Bend is considered as one of the Top Five U.S. National Parks, it is one of the least visited because of how it is to get there.

Dallas to the Texas/Mexico border town of Terlingua just outside the park where we stayed is about nine hours. To get across Texas in its entirety, east to west, takes approximately 14 hours, and north to south is 16 hours. In this same amount of time, you can hit 16 states driving from Georgia up to Maine! That’s how big Texas is.

But in Dallas I don’t feel this vastness—other than the endless traffic at every hour. There, greatness looks like self-importance. But out in West Texas, with its expansive sky, wide open highways, rugged mountains and towering canyon walls, vastness surrounds you, and the vastness of God becomes real.

Big Bend is over 800,000 acres and yet it covers just one corner of one state of one country on one planet. It is nothing compared to God! He who created heaven and earth, fills it completely. This literal big truth about God is certainly not new to me, but surrounded by the mountains and desert that is West Texas it hits in a new way. There is nowhere I can go that he is not there.

“Where shall I go from your Spirit?

Or where shall I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there!

If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there (Psalm 138:7-8)!”

Not only is he everywhere all the time, he’s fully present to me. He is not spread thin as we are trying to be present with our people. No, he who created heaven and earth holds us each in his hands and cares specifically for us. He who is infinitely beyond is intimately near.

If I take the wings of the morning

and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me,

and your right hand shall hold me (Psalm 139:9-10).”

We don’t always feel his nearness though do we? We may know what scripture says—that he cares about us (1 Peter 5:7), he is close to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18) and sustains us (Isaiah 46:4)—but our lived experience often says otherwise. We feel instead like I did in the middle of West Texas, so small, so insignificant. And we wonder in the vastness if he really cares. Does he hear my prayers? Do my tears matter?

This tension between faith and our feelings, God’s word and our reality, is every believer’s struggle at times. And yet in Christ we have guaranteed the assurance that our infinite God directs his infinite love toward us.

In the Garden of Gethsemane prior to Jesus’s arrest, he prayed for another way that God might accomplish his will—one that did not require him to be crucified. But God was silent and the next day Jesus was hung on the cross. There, he cried out again to the Father, “Why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus knows what it’s like for prayers to go unanswered, to be abandoned and to suffer—unto death. But God turned his back on his own son so we could always have his face. Because Jesus suffered the consequences of our sin, for those who trust in his work on our behalf, nothing can separate us from God’s love (Romans 8:38-39).

“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39).”

In West Texas, “Dark Sky Ordinances” restrict all outside lights. So, when the sun sets everything is pitch black, but the stars. In this stillness is a serenity we rarely experience, certainly not in the city. Except, when we know that a God SO big made himself small so that we would never be alone—that we would always be on his mind— there is a peace like nothing else can bring that settles our souls.

Help us Lord, stay at rest knowing you hold us.

“Fear not, for I am with you;

be not dismayed, for I am your God;

I will strengthen you, I will help you,

I will uphold you with my righteous right hand (Isaiah 41:10).”

Together Growing in Grace,

Kristen