BackstageIn the country my family comes from, there are villages that sit in the palm of the mountains, and the people who live in them have a particular way of being unafraid.
I do not mean they have no troubles. The winters are hard, the work is heavy, and grief visits those valleys the same as everywhere. I mean something quieter than that — a steadiness in the way they carry themselves, a refusal to be rattled by the news of the day, that I have come to think has something to do with what they see every time they lift their eyes. All the way around them, in every direction, stand the mountains — the same peaks their grandparents saw, and their grandparents' grandparents, ringing the village like a wall built by no human hand. Empires have risen and fallen down in the plains. Borders have been redrawn, languages pressed on them and taken away, whole ways of life come and gone. And the mountains have not moved an inch. You grow up inside a ring like that, and something of its steadiness gets into you. You stop believing that the loudest thing is the strongest thing.
There is an old song in Scripture that reaches for exactly this picture, and I have loved it my whole life because it is written in the only language my soul fully trusts, which is the language of mountains.
Two mountains in one short song
The song is one of the pilgrim songs — one of the ones the people sang climbing up to Jerusalem — and it makes two claims, and both of them are mountains.
The first is about the worshiper. Those who trust in Yahuah, it says, are like Mount Zion, which cannot be shaken and endures forever. Read that slowly, because it is an outrageous thing to say about a human being. It does not say the ones who trust in Yahuah are safe on the mountain, or near the mountain. It says they become the mountain — that a person whose whole weight has come to rest on the faithfulness of God takes on the property of the thing they are resting on. Trust does not just shelter you behind something immovable. Over a long enough time, it makes you immovable. The steadiness you lean into starts to become the steadiness you are.
I have watched this happen to people, slowly, over decades, and it is one of the most beautiful things I know. You meet an old believer who has trusted Yahuah through everything a life can throw — the losses, the betrayals, the long dry seasons, the fears that came true — and there is a quality to them that you cannot fake and cannot rush. They cannot be panicked. Bad news reaches them and does not knock them over. They have leaned their whole weight on the character of God for so many years that they have taken on its shape. They have become, in themselves, a little unshakeable. They are Mount Zion now. You could build a village in the shelter of a person like that.
The mountains that stand around
But the song does not stop there, and the second picture is the one that undoes me every time.
As the mountains surround Jerusalem, it says, so Yahuah surrounds His people, from this time forth and forevermore. Now you have to know the geography for the line to land. Jerusalem does not sit on an open plain, exposed on every side. It sits up in the hill country, cradled in higher ground, ringed by mountains that stand around it. Anyone who lived there saw those peaks every day of their life, the way the people in my family's village see theirs. And the songwriter looked at that ring of ancient, immovable, encircling mountains and said: that is a picture. That is what Yahuah is like around you. He does not merely stand in front of you like a shield you have to keep positioned toward the threat. He surrounds. He is the whole ring. There is no direction the danger can come from that He is not already standing in.
Think about how different that is from how most of us actually live. We tend to imagine God as protection on one side — the side we are watching, the threat we can see coming. And so we spin, exhausted, trying to keep Him positioned toward whatever we are most afraid of this week, sure that the real danger will come from the one direction we forgot to guard. But the song says He is not a shield you have to aim. He is a mountain range. He is behind you and before you and on both flanks, ancient and immovable, closing the whole horizon. The blow you never saw coming was coming from a direction He was already occupying. You were never guarding one exposed side of your life alone. You were, the whole time, standing in the center of a ring of peaks that no power on earth has ever managed to move.
And notice the timescale the song insists on: from this time forth and forevermore. The mountains around Jerusalem were old when the song was written and are still standing now, and that is the point. This is not a protection that lasts as long as your good behavior or your strong feelings. It is geological. It is on the timescale of mountains. The ring was there before you were born and will be there after you are gone, and your whole frantic little life of trying to hold yourself together happens entirely inside a shelter far older and steadier than your ability to maintain it.
For the one who feels exposed
So let me speak to whoever is feeling exposed right now — like you are standing alone on an open plain with the wind coming at you from a direction you cannot guard.
Something has come at you, or you are bracing for something to, and you feel utterly unsheltered, spinning to keep watch on every side at once, certain that you are one blind spot away from being overrun. You are so tired. Nobody can keep watch in every direction forever, and you have been trying to.
Hear me as a pastor who was raised in the palm of the mountains and has staked his life on the old song: you are not standing on an open plain. You are standing in the middle of a ring of peaks, and the peaks are Yahuah Himself, and they have not moved and they will not move. You do not have to guard the one side you are afraid of, because there is no undefended side. He surrounds. He is the whole horizon. The steadiness you keep trying to manufacture out of your own worn-out vigilance is already there, ancient and immovable, standing all the way around you from this time forth and forevermore.
So put your weight down. Lean the whole of it on the faithfulness of God, and keep leaning, for years, through everything — and watch what slowly happens to you. The mountain you are resting in will begin to get inside you. The unshakeable thing you are trusting will begin to become the unshakeable thing you are. That is the promise of the old pilgrim song, sung by people climbing up into the hills: the ones who trust in Yahuah do not merely shelter behind the mountain. In the end, held by a ring of peaks that will not be moved, they become one.
