It’s beautiful now in Old Morocco. Autumn hasn’t yet reached its peak, but it soon will. Already the slopes visible from my house are a patchwork of reds and yellows. There isn’t much left of those slopes. Once the height of the Himalayas, they’ve been worn down and uplifted and eroded to the big shaggy hills we call mountains around here. They’re still big enough to fill the skyline behind my house, though. Still big enough to fill my eyes and my heart and my imagination.

I try to run my mind back—like a video in fast reverse, adding centennial inches of stature to these large wrinkles in the landscape—to a time when no Hannibal or Daniel Boone would have made it to the other side of impassable walls, when the snows of Kilimanjaro lay perpetually on its peaks, when dinosaurs ranged its slopes. Before that—long before that—there were no mountains here: just a slowly shrinking ocean as continents inched toward one another, like locomotives in a super-slow-motion train wreck, crumpling up (with imperceptible movement) into majestic ruins of rocks pushing inexorably toward the sky. Sometime along the way the continents pulled apart again, leaving a piece of the old land sutured to those mountains as another ocean came into being.

I live in or close to that old land, I’m told. A geophysicist I see in a local coffee shop tells me he has a trilobite from Morocco on his counter at home. Could have crawled over to Virginia back when it was alive, he avers. Unimaginable ages ago. Fast reverse that video indeed. Someone once said that if the history of earth were a three-hour movie, human beings would make their appearance in the last second or so. Those mountains first emerged in the last ten or fifteen minutes of the show.

Those are the kinds of things I think as I sit on the deck behind my house in this latest fall season of an interminable line, enjoying the cold, crisp air, drinking in the beauty of the mountains, and feeling dwarfed by the immensity of time which reduces human life to a flicker briefer than a firefly’s. Like the psalmist who considered the night sky not so long ago, I wonder: “What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you consider him?” Before all this, what am I? What are we?

Nothing but a flash in the pan, but for the goodness and grace of God. For it is not the ancient grandeur and beauty of the Old Earth, but the surprising word of the New Creation that speaks hope and meaning into this stately but relentless march of time. Against the backdrop of stars and planets, mountains and seas, humans appear to be utterly insignificant. Considered only in and of themselves there is little reason to think otherwise.

Yet the Bible tells a story in which humans are “crowned with glory and honor,” made “ruler over the works of God’s hands,” with “all things in subjection under their feet” (Ps 8). In this view of things, human beings make more than a cameo appearance at the end of the flick. It is for them that the stage has been set, through them (chiefly though not only) that God deigns to extend –with infinite patience and care over time—his goodness and power and glory throughout all creation. Indeed, in the Christian story, God becomes a human being. In the resurrected person of Jesus the New Creation begins. It is only the beginning, not the ending, of His show.

It’s beautiful now in Old Morocco. The yellows and reds are tinged with glory and honor. I can see glimpses of the past and the future from here.