faithrunner

Picture by Chris Howlett Outside Cedar Ridge Lodge in the Glen Eyrie Conference Center near Colorado Springs and Garden of the Gods stands an outcrop of rock. It was one of those formations I am told that laid flat on an ocean floor until the violent shifting of the earth's crust stood it at a 90-degree angle to the earth like a giant vanilla wafer in a bowl of banana pudding. It dwarfed all the other outcroppings in the area. It formed a tiara crowning the valley where it stood. One Sunday morning on a break from my pastoral duties back home I walked out from the lodge and was shocked by the sun-splashed, sandstone skyscrapper rising out of the valley. I was not as overcome by its height as its shining and sheer audacity to stand erect in a sea of contours. It stood like a six-foot sixth grader among its peers--gwaky and obtrusive, yet powerful. I noticed that the face of the rock formation had become an apartment complex to the native birds of the region. They had buil