Better is One Day: On the Mountain

Yesterday I went on a group hike to Mount Utsayantha in Stamford. It's been something that Campus Ambassadors, the Christian fellowship group on both SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick's campuses, has done every year since I was a freshman. So I was doing some reflecting about the first time I'd been to that summit three years ago.

Yesterday I was standing on that mountain with people that three years ago, I had no idea even existed. It's funny how friendships come about – so unexpectedly and without warning. But once a deep connection is established, you wonder sometimes how you did life without them for so long. And when the time comes to be separated (I don't mean by death, but by a general moving-on to new places and adventures), that's when you can fully appreciate and notice their influence in your life. And you begin to see them and remember them in quiet moments.

Anyway, Mount Utsayantha is the first place that I ever had a direct encounter with God. I saw Him for the first time there. And I wanted to run very far away at first.

I remember deciding to go after being encouraged by one of the campus ministers, who contacted me by phone and email after I absentmindedly wrote down my info at a table Campus Ambassadors had set up in the quad. When I informed him that I wasn't into this Christian thing, he said that I was welcomed wholeheartedly anyway, which was an encouragement in and of itself.

I met a lot of people on the hike, made some connections and started to feel slightly comfortable. Then someone brought out a guitar and we started worshipping up on the summit. The very first song was “Better is One Day.” Recently I found the Scripture that this song is based on:

“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty!

My soul yearns, even faints,

for the courts of the Lord;

my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God...

Better is one day in your courts

than a thousand elsewhere;

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the

house of my God

than dwell in the tents of the wicked.

For the Lord God is a sun and shield;

the Lord bestows favor and honor;

no good thing does he withhold

from those whose walk is blameless.”

~Psalm 84:1-2, 10-11

That day three years ago, I remember being stunned and my mind filled with so many questions. Why would it be so much better to be with God? He was just this dude hanging out in the sky, who didn't care about me...right? As I was to find out in the coming months, my first impressions were way off.

But yesterday was wonderful – being able to spend time with some beautiful and awesome people and being able to see the beauty of God in the vast nature of this earth. And I can attest to the song and the psalm it is based on: it IS better to spend one day in God's courts than a thousand days elsewhere. Because in Him is the grace we so desperately need and a joy that comes from nowhere else.

Campus Ambassdors Hike 2013! (Photo Credit to Susan Young)