La Bloga de Timoteo: Dos

On Wednesday, we visited a few points of interest on the Yucatan. Dzibilchaltun, Uxmal, and a few cenotes. A cenote is a sink hole where the large peninsula aquafir can be accessed via a hole on the ground. This aquufir spans the entire peninsula creating a network of underground rivers. The water contained therein is beautifully clear and just slightly under the air temperature; in short, it is wonderful to swim in one of these watering holes. The first of these pools that we visited was within the Dzibilchaltun campus. The pool here was beautiful: sparkling blue with lily pads in the center with a bottom that is shallow on one end and descends to the other into an abyss. It was about 10 am when we arrived to the cenote and i had already begun to sweat. Seeing everyone else wading in, I decided to cool off by jumping in. When I jumped in, I had fish swirling all around me. Each jump was as exhilarating as the first and we just drip dried back to the car.


Photo by Bruce Cebell of Tim jumping into the above ground cenote at Dzibilchaltun


After this we drove down a bumpy, nondescript farm road where we eventually stopped at a small concrete tube sticking out of the ground. Down through a small crack and into a cave, we found ourselves standing on a ledge over a giant pool of water. The only thing we could see was two small beams of light originating from the entrance while the rest was black. Small catfish swam silently backlit ever so slightly by the beams of light and a single bat would dart from one side of the cave to the other every once in a while.

Photo by Bruce Cebell of the sunlight shining into the cenote lake in the cave

Photo by Bruce Cebell of the APTS group swimming in the Cenote
From Left to Right: Gregory Cuellar, Greg Allen-Pickett, Cathy Stone, Beth Gleason, Tim Gray

The air was warm and humid as we all jumped in together.
As we sat in the water, enveloped by the cool blue light and smooth dark rock, my mind wandered. What can this mean? Where is God here?

Did you know that there are almost no above-ground rivers in the Yucatan? You can wander for days and never find any water. Although there is jungle everywhere, the majority of surviving plants are either cactus or have long roots to tap the deep water table. This is a desert.

How wonderous and awesome that there are these cenotes, that seem to just appear in the middle of nowhere. For me the teaching is obvious. Where is God? The sunday school answer is: all around us, but we don't always see this or trust in it. Sometimes we find ourselves in a jungle desert which over stimulates us with greenery and the cacophony of noise from a thousand birds and millions of insects. We can walk for days searching for God to quench our thirst, but when we only focus on what we see, we can't find anything.

Only until we find a cenote are we jarred from this desert. The water cools and relaxes us, but slowly we realize that this water, this agua de vida, streches far beyond this hole but is under the ground everywhere.

God was not hiding in a hole, but was under everything the entire time. We only allowed the desert jungle to maintain our focus when in all reality, we just needed to look under our feet. I'm not saying that we should ignore the desert and only focus on what is underneath. The desert is real, thirst is real. But we can quench that thirst and inform our ideas about this jungle when we realize that God is here. Now. With us.

God bless.