At the top of Nine Mile Mountain on the Snow Mountain Ranch YMCA of the Rockies property in Colorado is a mailbox labelled “God’s Mailbox”. Anyone can climb the mountain and leave a letter to God there.
We climbed Nine Mile Mountain last week and peeked into the mailbox. There were several sealed letters there. We did not disturb them. After posing for pictures and enjoying the view, we hiked back down the mountain.
But I’ve been pondering ever since… if I were to leave a letter to God in that mailbox, what would it say?
For today, for now, I think my letter would say, “Thank You.”
Thank you for this glorious extended vacation in Colorado. Thank you for golden aspens, everywhere around us, glowing with light and changing by the hour from green to gold to orange to red.
Thank you for green pine trees, for blue Stellar jays and even bluer skies. Thank you for Alpine Harebells and magenta-blossomed thistles, for blueberries and huckleberries and tiny red leaves on the plants hugging the ground. For a small, still pond, surrounded by autumn grass, framed by pine trees, looking up to an aspen-dotted mountain.
Thank you for the sound of the wind in aspen leaves. Thank you for the slanting afternoon sunlight, for the shadows of clouds traveling across the mountaintops. For the scent of pine. For the rough feel of a quartz boulder jutting out of the alpine tundra, and the metallic sparkles within it, that will sparkle tomorrow and the next day and will probably still be sparkling a thousand years from now.
Thank you for knowing how drained and depleted I would be when I came here, to Colorado. Thank you for filling me up with beauty, with joy, with peace. Thank you for nourishing my soul.
Thank you for the people in my life, like my friend of 50 years and her husband and their daughter, who showed us everything they loved most about Rocky Mountain National Park.
Thank you for my family, who are with me now in another part of Colorado. Thank you for grand and joy-filled celebrations like we had this week (two outdoor grandchild baptisms in a mountain river and our daughter and her husband’s renewal of their wedding vows in a grassy meadow with a backdrop of aspens, mountain, and blue sky). Thank you for all the happiness and fun of family reunions: For hikes. For hugs, for laughter, for s’mores. For the joy that grandchildren bring, just by being themselves. For family stories retold to raucous laughter around the campfire.
Thank you also for quiet times like my husband and I are having this afternoon, watching over a dying campfire, a family dog beside us, as other family members nap or go into town. Thank you for the mountain river roaring by just a few feet from where we sit, saying, over and over again, Now! Now! Now! Is the very life of life, the very moment of moments: don’t slumber through this magical instant.
As I write this letter to God, sitting in the sunshine by the still-warm fire, I am remembering that Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”
So, today, this “thank you” is my letter to God.
And I am wondering… what letter would you put in God’s mailbox today?
***
What happens to the letters left in God’s mailbox on Nine Mile Mountain? Every now and then the YMCA chaplain collects the letters from the mailbox, takes them down the mountain, prays over them, and then burns them, unopened. For they are letters to God, not to any of us.