(*Photo[s] of the Month)
Gail and I have just
completed a wonderful season of ministry among some dear new friends at a
church in southern New Mexico. Working alongside the leaders and families of
Sonoma Springs Covenant Church of Las Cruces will always be a life highlight
for us, and we are deeply grateful for the opportunity to have shared this
season with them.
Heading into this
ministry experience last year, church life we knew. What we had no knowledge of
was the uniqueness of New Mexico. The beauty of the state is an incredible
thing but a well-kept secret, likely not a place many of you outside Colorado
or Texas have visited. We were not only stunned by the loveliness of its high deserts
and high mountains, and by the unique habitats formed by such things as bosques,
remote canyon springs and sky islands; but we were also mesmerized by New
Mexico’s geology, agriculture and human culture, and by the ways all of the
above impact the area’s convergence of diverse histories, among them, archaeological
and ancient puebloan histories, native American histories, and the histories of
Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Civil War of the United States, the
American west, and the more recent Atomic and Space Ages. I don’t know that I
have ever been surrounded by a more diverse conglomeration of habitats and
histories.
Of course, while there
we did as much hiking as spare time allowed, even encountered our first
rattlesnakes and tarantulas while doing so! (We had actually been surprised never
to have seen them before, what with all the traipsing we do.) But since our
love for the people we worked with there and our delight with the state will
not fade, I thought it timely once again to focus my photo(s) of the month on
one of New Mexico’s less-known natural lovelies, one of our favorites, White Sands National Monument. Just
northeast of Las Cruces, it was established in 1933 by President Herbert Hoover
to protect a unique landform created through a coincidental cooperation of
wind, precipitation, topography and geology. Not really ‘sand’ in the technical
sense (which is made up of quartz-based silica and rock particles), these dunes
are made of gypsum particles, a soft, water-soluble sulfate mineral, the main component
of plaster and chalkboard chalk. 
The dunes form in this
way. Area precipitation is impounded in what is called the Tularosa Basin, a 6,500 square mile bowl surrounded by mountains,
with no riversheds or outlets to drain it. Dissolved gypsum from the mountains
flows with water into the basin, and as that water evaporates or sinks, gypsum
selenite crystals are formed on the desert floor. These in turn crumble, and crumbs
are picked up by prevailing winds and deposited on the dune field. Now, if it’s
water-soluble, I’m not sure why the whole thing doesn’t just melt when it
rains, so I’ll have to keep studying that! Suffice it to know, in regards to
comfort, that these picturesque white sands remain fairly cool to the feet in
the hot sun compared to regular sand, and, in regards to beauty, are especially
good at picking up apparently blue shadows in the morning and evening as the
sun is low in the sky. It all makes for a fantastical sort of environment to
enjoy – hiking, dune running and jumping, unique moonlight concerts, even year-round
sledding! And by the way, White Sands National Monument is the largest gypsum
dune field in the world, 275 square miles in size.
I love dunes. It not
only brings me back to my church youth group days as a teen, and our many trips
to sand dune beach parks near Chicago on Lake Michigan. It also reminds me of
God’s heart toward you and me expressed by David the Psalmist: “How precious to me are Your thoughts, O
God! How vast is the sum of them! If I should count them,
they would outnumber
the grains of sand…” (Psalm 139:17-18)
~~ RGM, June 25 2015
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