High Places ...

"For behold, He who forms mountains and creates the wind And declares to man what are His thoughts, He who makes dawn into darkness and treads on the high places of the earth ..." Amos 4:13

I grew up in the Appalachian region of Kentucky and my friends and I spent a lot of time in the mountains. As children, we tore up cardboard boxes and slid down the sedge grass on the lower slopes. We drank from cold, mountain springs and swam and fished in the rushing waters of silver quick streams.

As teenagers, we spent a lot of nights parked on wide spaces along the roads that crossed the mountains. We drank beer and sat on car hoods and tried to grow up. We struggled with doubts, argued, and debated philosophy in accordance with beer consumed. There was never a better place to be young.

It was Huckleberry Finn in the Appalachians. It was James Still’s River of Earth. In the shadow of Still's sun-ball, we were “a borning, a begetting, and a dying.”

Sadly, it seems the love of money always trumps plain good sense and in recent years Old King Coal has rearranged the Appalachian landscape. There's money to be made and the most cost effective way to make it is to blow the mountains apart and scrape up the coal.

Streams that have nourished the rivers of Kentucky for eons are choked off now. Trees that have stood watch since Daniel Boone walked through the Cumberland Gap lie broken and rotting on the ground ... the destruction of entire ecosystems ... the death rattle of a dying industry ... 

Genesis says we have been given dominion over the earth and over the plants and animals of the earth, If that's the case, I'm pretty sure God envisioned careful stewardship not carte blanche issuance of mountain top removal permits.

The Appalachians are among the oldest mountains on earth and they are sacred ... the province of the pilgrim ... and when coal is mined it should be mined in the least intrusive way possible. When we destroy places of the spirit, we erase our collective memory ... and we lose our ability to appreciate our smallness.

Here's Terry Muncy ...