Nils Krausser

Dear Friends,

On Labor Day weekend, my family and I took a trip up to Prescott. Sunday morning we headed to Thumb Butte, a small mountain (if one is aiming to impress) but more like a rather large hill. The weather was perfect with light clouds and a seventy degree breeze.

My boys and their cousins clamber up the trail in front of me, enjoying every second of the hike, sticks in hand. Farther ahead my wife, sister-in-law, and leading the way at a brisk pace, is Tata, the boy’s grandfather. I watch the boys, enjoying the precious years of childhood wonder. What a glorious thing to be a child, without pre-conceived, locked in, interpretations of everything around us. For them life is a blank canvas being filled in with color. I think about Tata, leading his most precious children and grandchildren. What pride he must feel. And for a moment I let my mind try to imagine some vague image of the future. 

“There shall never fail you a successor…if only your children look to their way, to walk before me as you have walked before me.” (1 Kings 8:25)

It always feels strange to ponder the passing of time. As the wet paint of a child’s mind applies itself in all imaginable ways on life’s canvas, the challenge for me is to see if I can add more color to my own canvas, despite the many dried layers. Can I continue to evolve with them to learn with them and to lead them, so that one day, perhaps, they can do the same for their children?

We arrive at the summit, a 360-degree expanse of nature’s beauty. 

Solomon, himself, realized that his house he built for the Lord could never contain the vastness of God. “Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built.” (1 Kings 8: 27)

As I look around at the vastness of creation, I get a small sense of what Solomon might have felt.

Faithfully,

—Nils