“Echoes” Artwork Week Two: Relationships and the Old Tram

This is part two in a series on our artwork for “Echoes of a Voice,” our series for Advent 2020. If you haven’t read the intro to the series, start there first! You don’t need to read each post in order, but here is post one if you haven’t seen it.

Replay the “Hunger for Relationships” Service

God exists in relationship with Himself (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and has patterned us after Himself. God is a relational God and therefore we are also created for relationship. Our hunger for relationships with each other is an echo of God’s voice calling us into a relationship with Him.

This second photo from John Forney’s What Remains? series is in the same geographic ballpark as the first photo, the Old One Hundred Boarding House, 2,000 feet above the Old One Hundred Mine in Silverton, Colorado. In a disorienting frame of reference, one mountainside makes up the foreground, while a different mountainside makes up the background. In the middle is the long-derelict tram that ran to and from the boarding house.

In our souls there is a gargantuan longing for intimate relationship with God, but the divide between us regularly feels unfathomable and disorienting. Though surely God is much closer than we think, by giving us each other, He has given us a measure of grace and a signpost. We’re like a tram for each other up a high mountain, or at least we’re a memory of a time when man and God could visit each other like human friends visit.

But at this point in history, Christians know how the chasm between God and man is truly, safely crossed. Jesus came to make a way for us to have a relationship with Him. He went through great lengths: being born as a human, taking on flesh, living a perfect and sinless life, dying in our place, conquering death, and coming back to life so that—because of His life—we could be at peace with God through relationship with our Creator.