The Amazon Jungle

Last weekend, I went to the jungle—the Amazon Jungle. Seriously, part of the Amazon Jungle is in our mission. And there’s a tiny little branch of the church in Tena, which is a town on the western edge of the Amazon. Tena’s two rivers merge in the middle of town and flow into the Amazon River, which traverses very nearly the entire continent of South America—from the Andes where Quito is on the far west, all the way to the east and into the Atlantic Ocean.

I have seen some amazing vistas in my life like the Columbia River Gorge, the Napali coastal mountain range in Kauai, any ocean from any island, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. But to overlook the Amazon Jungle as you descend from the Andes Mountains and see only trees all the way to the horizon is a humbling and breathtaking experience.

Nature has enormous mass. The biodiversity in the Amazon is staggering. There are monkeys and birds and mammals and reptiles and insects that are completely foreign to us. Plants grow on top of plants. Water is everywhere, running down the mountainside in waterfalls, rising in vapor, hanging in the air.

Nature has immense power. Running water is patient, but eventually wins every contest. Frequently, we saw landslides where the roots of plants could no longer hold the earth intact and the land gave way, sliding onto the road. We saw boulders the size of our bus. (Yes, it did occur to me to wonder just when that landslide occurred, and I said yet another prayer for safe passage.)

Nature gives. The clouds rising from the jungle remind me of the photosynthesis cycle I learned about in high school—that a byproduct of green plants is oxygen.

Water, oxygen, plants, animals as far as you can see. Self-sustaining. Abundant. Self-perpetuating. We do indeed live on a beautiful planet.

Again, these pictures don’t do the landscape justice, but they are all I have.