I had just finished my first year at Yale Divinity School when I joined the ministry staff at Grand Canyon National Park in the summer of 1977. I hadn’t yet preached a sermon, hadn’t even taken a homiletics class. So I was a little intimidated when I learned that my position involved leading a daily, early-evening “worship walk” along a portion of the canyon’s South Rim, ending with a sermon in a small outdoor chapel perched on a cliff facing west. But I soon realized that this was the perfect place to launch a ministry career, because it’s likely that no one was listening very closely to what I preached. The background stole all the attention. Is there anything more spectacular than a sunset over the Grand Canyon?

During my three months there, I was in chronic awe of the canyon’s breathtaking beauty and endless wonders. How could I ever forget the evening that a blazing red sun slipped below the western horizon the same moment an enormous, salmon-colored full moon rose in the east? The colors of the canyon walls constantly changed in shifting light, and the night sky showcased an immense, dazzling canopy of stars unlike anything I had ever seen. One August night, after the heat of the day had faded, two ministry colleagues and I launched a 21-mile hike from rim to rim. Sometime after midnight, stretched out for a few hours of rest on the bank of the rushing Colorado River, I saw a star shoot across the opening of the sky high above the canyon walls. Then another. And then several more at once. I stopped counting at a hundred, learning later that we were spectators to the annual Perseid meteor shower.

My ministry path took me to Sojourners Community in inner-city Washington, D.C., as different a setting as I could imagine from the Grand Canyon. But I carried its beauty with me as I served people on the capital city’s streets for a decade and a half. Through the years, memories from that summer almost fifty years ago have reminded me, in a variety of ministry settings, of the importance of taking time to be in awe of the created world and all its splendor. And although the backdrops have changed, I try to remember when I preach that the real point of attention is the miraculous work of God.

Joyce H., Grand Canyon National Park, 1977

Rev. Joyce Hollyday served as an associate editor of Sojourners magazine and an associate conference minister for the Southeast Conference of the United Church of Christ. She was a co-founder and co-pastor of Circle of Mercy church in Asheville, N.C., and is the author of several books on spirituality and social justice, most recently Pillar of Fire, a historical novel about the extraordinary medieval mystics known as Beguines.