One [rachel]

From inside my car, I could tell only that the night was black, not that it was also blustery. I parked, stepped outside, and knew the coolness. My car was just two blocks off the busy street, and I had come to this point in Mt. Washington from an English department reception full of friends and food. I wanted to be alone. I wanted quiet moments with God. And I wanted them not safely in my house but here in the dark and the wind where I felt just unsafe enough to feel even a small sense of both fear and awe.

I hurried up the street on foot, crossed the main road, and half-walked, half-jogged to the railing that lines McArdle Road. McArdle is hard to drive. It scales the side of a bluff, rising high above the Monongahela River on its southern shore. The road is straight until it makes a hairpin curve away from the water at the very crest of the hill. The ascent, though, is made most treacherous by its beauty. One look to the right and I have to consciously turn my eyes back to the pavement, the guard rail, the oncoming traffic. Just across the river the Golden Triangle, Pittsburgh’s downtown, glows in its nighttime finery. A million tiny lights, the illuminated water of the Point’s fountain, the constant motion of headlights and boat lights . . . yellow, green, red, blue, purple. A visual feast.

I gripped the railing, looking down the sheer side of the bluff feeling my body sway ever so slightly with the mere suggestion of falling. I was safe, occupying the same space of sidewalk that thousands of others traverse gazing at the panorama of Pittsburgh from such a perfect vantage point. But the wind rushing up and around me, the darkness of the night, and the presence of One drew me intently into a feeling of dangerous delight. The charcoal grey clouds over Pittsburgh’s tallest buildings rolled, forming and reforming into massive shapes. Their undersides glowed, the slate sky behind them looking angry, flat, and distant. The heavens were upside down, the stars glowing from the manmade splendor of city beneath what looked like a churning ocean of stormy grey undercurrents. I felt the spray of the sky-waves on my bare arms and neck.

Some part of me wanted to leave, to rush back to my car and drive home where I could lock myself safely away from the night, from the dangerous sky and wind, from the One capable of making them. But I remained for minutes, long awe-full minutes wondering about the God, my God, who could draw me so intensely to His side in the midst of tumultuous beauty. I thought I would stand there captivated by lights, sounds, the vastness of urban constructions. Instead, my eyes locked on the ever-moving expanse above, my skin responding to the soft, strong buffet of the wind.

Not long after I returned to my car, friends called me on the phone. They thought they’d seen me standing by the railing on McArdle. “Are you in trouble? Do you need our help?” Somehow they sensed the danger though they thought it was perhaps because of a broken-down car. I told them I was fine, on my way back home. I just wanted to feel the air, see the city. They know how I love heights. I didn’t tell them that I’d felt threatened, just unsafe enough to want to run. Not threatened by cars. Not by people. Not even by darkness and solitude. But by the One, the One who made the angry slate color, the multitudinous churning clouds. The One who made me. The One whose love is so tender, so fierce.