Algonquin Park

Well, I’m currently staying in a small cabin in Algonquin Park, a National Park a few hours North of Toronto. Although, by the time I have internet to post this, I will be back in my room. But before returning to the cabin this evening, I spent about half an hour lying in a hammock, looking through the pine trees at the stars. It’s beautiful country up here, we are just by a lake (with unlimited use of canoes and kayaks!) and we are just coming into Fall, so all of the leaves are beginning to change colour and it all looks beautiful. We had a little drama earlier this evening when one of the other cabins decided that it would be a smart idea to leave some wood drying on top of a wood fire heater in their room, while they all had dinner in our cabin. Just in time, one of the other girls went out to grab a jumper and saw that there was a strange light on in the other cabin. By the time we got there, there was so much smoke you couldn’t see a metre in front of you, and couldn’t stay in there for more than a few moments. Fortunately the fire was still on top of the stove, but was pretty close to the roof, so a few more minutes and it may have taken us more than a bucket of water to get it out! It was way too much drama, especially when some of the girls decided they needed to run in and get their stuff, so I just ended up blocking the doorway, cause they wouldn’t have been able to make it through the smoke! It was a close call, but way too much drama, and the retelling of it didn’t stop for the rest of the weekend!
As some of you know, looking at the stars is one of my favourite activities, and I often find that I connect with God far more through this than most church services. I watched a dvd last week called ‘Finger of God’, and one of the lines in it that really stood out to me was “your god is only as big as your head”. I really liked that idea, as I’ve recently been thinking about all of the different interpretations of God that we have, and how one God can be treated in so many different ways. And it struck me tonight that all of the people I encountered while I was travelling had put up walls in their head, or boxed god into what they could imagine, perceive, or fit into their lives. We try and come up with reasons and arguments and explanations for things, whether it be evolution and creation, miracles, or satan and hell, and often spend time trying to convince others that our theories are the correct ones. But lying, looking at the stars tonight, that didn’t seem to work for me because the thing that I love about these kind of situations is that there are no walls in the sky. Even the trees that were around us, you could still see through them to the stars, and those stars are so infinite, that I can’t begin to grasp them. So maybe there are no answers. Maybe our explanations are simply what we use to justify the walls in our mind, simplify our lives by eliminating the questions, and maybe that’s why I’m here- to stretch my mind and learn that even if I am better at or more comfortable with one particular area, God still exists outside of that spot and it is only through stretching our minds that we can begin to grasp the magnitude and complexity of God. I don’t know.