Over the last week, my family and I have started off my summer break from college with a tour of just a few national parks. We’ve gone to Yosemite several times, and this time we saw the Grand Canyon and Zion Canyon for the first time. Many pictures were taken and many miles were hiked.

God’s creation is amazing on a normal day, but at places like the national parks I went to this week, it’s stunningly glorious. In this modern world, pictures of the Grand Canyon abound. They cannot encompass anywhere near how gigantic and beautiful the canyon really is. My day of staring right at it from all sorts of angles can’t even really give me an accurate impression.

I took a lot of my own pictures, and I’ve seen many over the course of my life, but no picture is enough for these locations. The Grand Canyon is a single attraction that encompasses miles of beauty, and Zion is made up of several different, amazing locations that are all unique in one way or another. Zion and Yosemite share many similar features, like tall cliffs and waterfalls, but the sandstone of Zion versus the granite of Yosemite renders the two of them entirely different from each other.

Every place in the world is unique somehow, and none can be entirely captured on camera. They have to be experienced. It’s not possible to experience everything there is to see in this world within the course of one lifetime. I think that makes it even more important to see beauty in what we do experience and take it all in as fully as possible.

That goes for wherever we are, whether that be a national park or a city block. That said, I think visiting a park near you, either state or national, can be an amazing opportunity to be blown away by God’s majesty and take in the serenity of natural beauty.

For me, one of my major concerns when thinking about hiking is how skilled I have to be to pull it off. The answer to that one is simple: you can set your own pace. The places I’ve gone provide maps when you enter the park, listing trails and how strenuous each is.

Since no one in my family is skilled at hiking and we all wanted to walk around, we chose a few half-day hikes rather than any long ones. Railings are often there to guard against potential falls, but despite the safety, the hikes we went on still allowed us to fully enjoy the parks without overtaxing ourselves. We also went on a bus tour and spent some time just driving around!

There’s no right way to engage with these places. They’re accessible for all types of people and all kinds of preferences.

I encourage you to consider visiting a state or national park when next you have the opportunity. There’s no set standard on how to enjoy beauty, so anything you want to do once you’re there will work just perfectly. Pictures and videos can give us an idea of another place, sure, but they can’t show you everything. Some things, you have to see for yourself to really appreciate fully.

“Before the mountains were born or You gave birth to the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, You are God."
Psalm 90:2

This world is so incredibly complex and glorious in its way, and no place makes that more obvious than a national park, but this world isn’t infinite.

Imagine: God is. Time doesn't exist with Him. Visit these bastions of earthly glory, and let that glory reflect back onto the one Who created them all.