It has been a busy summer up here in Cooke City and at Mt. Republic Chapel of Peace. Weddings, baptisms, two church services on Sundays, picnics, gatherings and many a traveler to the Park. Then, on Tuesday, I woke up and it was 29 degrees with light frost on everything. I drove through town and, in part because of constant and relentless road construction, there was hardly anyone in town. Slowly, the summer residents are trickling away. In a few weeks, there will be a few die-hard summer residents and locals left. And, more than likely, our first snow-fall will be in the next few weeks as well.
Over the summer, I did several outdoor weddings. The most exciting was down in Crandall, Wyoming, just east then south of Cooke City, over on the Chief Joseph Highway. The wedding was to be at 2:00 and everything was set up beautifully. It was sunny and a light breeze blew over the mountains.
The clouds began to build and then a large black cloud surfaced over Hunter's Peak. I thought it would blow to the north of us. And I was right, except for a weird effect that comes off the mountain. Hunter's Peak is a large cliff face facing the east. My theory is that it creates downdrafts when the wind and pressure is just right. This day, it was just right. 10 minutes before the wedding, the eastern moving winds suddenly reversed direction and in a moment I was trying to stand up in a 90 mile an hour straight-line wind heading west. It knocked down two very tall and very beautiful pine trees.
Amazingly, the fallen trees just missed the wedding chairs and setup. Even more importantly, they just missed the guests who had just started to seat themselves. Even the CD player, bent and beat up from the fallen tree, still worked. God must have been looking out for the couple, though the groom had some momentary second thoughts. The bride was bound and determined to have an outdoor wedding.
As I led the service, I kept listening to the creaking of cracked tree tops and broken branches slipping and falling through the trees. It was a little nerve-wracking, but the couple said "I do" and were married happily.
Fall is in the air now and the calls for weddings have stopped. The moose have come down out of the high country, at least a couple times. And last night, the wolf pack was howling by the stream behind our house. All of these are signs that the weather has changed. It happened overnight and we can smell it in the air. The great thing about living up in Cooke City, the highest town in Montana at about 7700 feet above sea level, is how sensitive we become to the changes in the weather. It is 70 degrees today, just like it has been for the past 4 or 5 weeks. But it is different now.
It is a subtle sensibility, and as a pastor, I always have to think about the spiritual implications of such things. Our faith life is a sensibility as well. We do not just agree in our minds to a thing and then it is done. We develop a sensitivity to the invisible things of the spirit and hopefully seek to increase our sense of those subtle movements of God in our lives. It is not easy and there are many things we can do to mask what some deeper part of ourselves already sense. But sometimes the greatest act of faith is to simply stand there and feel the changes in the weather, however subtle they may be.
Peace to all,
Pastor Seth
