Have you been to Montana's Glacier National Park?  During my recent sojourn in the West, I spent about a week in Glacier.  I had not been in twenty-nine years, so I loved being back.  The first time I was in Glacier, even longer than twenty-nine years ago, in the autumn of 1974, I trekked along its share of the Continental Divide, hiking over mountains, through valleys, camping at numerous alpine lakes, and into Canada.  It was a fabulous and life changing trip.
     Now, over forty years later, Glacier still looks like Glacier (although sadly, due to climate change, its glaciers are shrinking; some have disappeared altogether).  Its mountains have not changed, its forests are still strong, its waters pristine as ever.  Its passes remain formidable, its trails yet a challenge.
     All this is good.  It's good that, thanks to its being a national park, Glacier has been preserved for over one hundred years, and that its animals and scenery will remain inviolate for generations to come.
     On the other hand, we will certainly change over the years of our lives.  At least we should.  We should be responding to the challenges and joys of growth and age, should be allowing existence (and God) to shape and mold us into wiser and more whole people. That's why returning to places that do not, largely, change is good for us.  We place ourselves in permanence, set our mercurial beings in things that do not pass away quickly, things that hold to presence nearly indefinitely.  We give our change to the changeless.
     And we get perspective.  We understand a bigger picture.  We grasp larger facts about existence.  And maybe, just maybe, we get fresh glimpses of how, despite the material cacophonies of our lives, inexorably mortal we are, and how much we tread on the edge of a fundamental insecurity of place.
     Then perhaps we realize that though we enjoy this earthly home, we see that it would not be a home were it not the expression of a personal universe, a personal universe filled with a personal God.