A Fresh Box Of Crayons

Today I truly remembered why I wanted to take the bus from Rio to Sao Paulo and not just fly. Seeing the landscapes of another country is priceless.

I admit that I was pretty tired after last night's adventures so keeping my eyes open through the entire 7 1/2 hour bus ride did not happen. We rolled out of Rio at 10 a.m. and did not arrive in Sao Paulo until 4 p.m., but then we were on the bus for another hour before arriving at the station in Santo Andre, Gui's portion of town.

I dozed off as we departed Rio but would open my eyes hit and miss--noticing the buildings and houses getting smaller and more spread out every time that I did. Finally, I opened them to see nothing but gorgeous mountains, completely free of any trees reaching up to the sky. As tired as I continued to be I knew that I had to soak all of this in. The natural beauty of a world so far from the one in which I live.

Looking out the bus windows all I could think about was how narrow minded my scope the potential beauty of the land on this Earth has been until now. As a kid when you are first using crayons and making pictures, you draw simple hills and color them with the standard Crayola green. The sky is blue with some clouds and maybe you´ll place some trees: a brown thick trunk with a fluffy green top. As the knobs passed in front of my eyes on the bus from Rio I felt like I was seeing beyond the coloring pages of a child for the first time ever; realizing the numerous shades of green that exist beyond that standard grass green; realizing the many shapes of a hill, knob or mountain and the many types of trees far beyond just the leafy tops. I cannot even describe the array of green I saw in a simple glance. Many knobs were completely bare with only tall yellow-green grass blowing in the wind; others were lined--in seemingly perfect rows--with skinny,dark green tops.

Further along the sides of those knobs that were treeless had come tumbling down, my guess due to the lack of tree roots to hold the soil down. Still, though, the beauty continued as the dirt ranged from pinkish to nearly dark red colors. It was as if the mountains about been chopped into with a knife and were left to bleed. Again, red dirt--something I never would have colored in my own drawings. My mind was being blown with sites my mind had never even been capable of imagining. In one instance I seriously stared at the side of a mountain and thought to myself, "That looks like a giant grig in the middle of my coloring page." (sorry to those who don't know "grig".) Like I'd finished a picture and someone spilled something in the middle or dropped the wrong crayons and left marks in the middle of the page. This random dark spot on the mountains was so random that that I cannot imagine someone creating it, but God's art is one of a kind. His imagination is far beyond ours and I suppose what keeps ours expanding. He proves over and over that his wonders are endless.