Reflections on faith & life from the road by Drew Rollins '21
Should you ever find yourself agaze, maybe full of yearning (if you’re anything like me), from the particular window at which I’m currently seated, try letting your eyes unfocus for a minute. Treat it like an optical illusion. Before you, the panorama’s color palette becomes blurred and stratified; fine details of creation retreat temporarily; it all starts to look like a Rothko painting—grey-white on blue on starkest white, slate on earth-brown on perseverant green.
I’m writing from a funny little bookstore/cafe in Boulder, Colorado, the rear casement of which looks out onto a grand expanse of wild, (to me heretofore) unfamiliar American terrain. Jagged, snowy peaks reach heavenward like a semicircle of greedy siblings competing to dominate the cornflower horizon. A narrow brook, presumably condescending from one such peak, trickles downwards, nurturing the adjacent foliage, slow but indefatigable, as though in search of something. I wonder where its contents will end up. Does it replenish some groundwater basin, or feed into the Platte or the Arkansas or the Yampa? Will the Pacific swell, just a bit, from its near imperceptible contribution?
A few weeks ago, I requested to take a hiatus from work and headed west in a gold pick-up truck that’s older than me. The expedition’s primary objectives: to visit friends, to write a lot, and to connect more deeply with (among other things) nature, myself, and my faith. I’m not sure how successful I’ve been thus far, and there are moments when that uncertainty distresses me—at what point will the life-altering enlightenment strike, ya know? In the past couple days, though, two verses have in tandem provided some measure of solace. One is an Old Testament charge: “Look to the Lord and His strength; seek His face always” (1 Chronicles 16:11). And the other is a New Testament complement: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12).
The second verse mollifies the fear that a faith without dramatic discoveries or epiphanic visions is a faith without substance. For me, there is comfort in the notion of a Spirit that indwells us and enables us to love others well, even when said Spirit (or its role in the trajectory of our lives) is difficult to catch a glimpse of. Meanwhile, the first verse reiterates the value of continuing to search, in spite of—or perhaps even because of—those eras of rudderlessness that seem intrinsic to existence. We are meant to keep looking for God/struggling towards betterment/seeking that which we cannot see. In addition to whatever dividends it pays, I think there’s a sort of strange, paradoxical beauty in a quest like that, as nebulous as it can feel. The earth doesn’t need to shatter, and the ground doesn’t have to break. Faith endures and embraces doubt; it hinges on more than constant surety.
I want to be so undeterred. I want to keep combing the mountainside for inspiration and truth. I want to really believe that humans—like the peaks I’m surveying, born of old plate tectonics, violent collisions, and hard cataclysms, weathered by persistently erosive winds—are topographic creatures; that we’re shaped by what we experience, burnished by what we cherish, smoothed over by what we withstand. I want to be secure in uncertainty, to treasure the growth it fosters. I want love to flow from me, unremitting and forceful, even when I can’t quite envision its ultimate destination.