I love being outside, especially doing things like hiking. I was out visiting my sister and her fiance, David, in Colorado Springs last week, and we drove up in the mountains for a hike at Mueller Stat Park. It was a gorgeous day, and since there's been rain almost every day there for a few weeks, the pastures are really green and full of wildflowers.

When we were kids, our parents took us camping and hiking for vacations all the time. We'd go for a weekend, or for as long as over two weeks. We had a pop-up camper and a pickup truck we'd pack with food and water and sleeping bags. When I was older I had my own pup tent. We never took radios, and our camp sites were quiet, unless an unruly band of college kids or a raucous family camped near us with a boom box. We regularly primitive camped where there was no running water or electricity, and almost never other people. Dad and Mom wouldn't turn on the truck radio except to get weather reports or news once in a while. I grew up appreciating quiet and solitude in nature. It was like church, only better since there were birds and wind in the pines and running streams.

So it felt good to be out in that kind of quiet again last week. I don't get it very often living in the suburbs, and most of my time outside the suburbs is spent in Chicago, where it's even more noisy. We hiked along a mountain edge with views of distant mountain ranges. Where the trail ended was a rocky outcropping that looked down to a gorge and across to several ranges to the south, west and north.

My hackles were raised as soon as we arrived, though. There was a big group of people talking way too loudly for my taste, and a teenager was standing on the rocks with the best view talking into his cell phone. I wanted to go up to him, gently take it from him, and chuck it down the rock face into the gorge. I didn't, but I sure wanted to.

Alicia and I climbed up on the rocks and took a seat. Eventually the people packed their baby in its stroller and trooped off. I don't know how they got a stroller down the somewhat washed out and rolling path, but we weren't going to ask. When they left, I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer, asking God to be with us.

As I finished my prayer and stayed silent, a breeze kicked up and washed over us. We could hear it swishing through the pines and aspens, and feel it pushing against us as we sat in the warm sun. I opened my eyes and watched as a storm approached from the north, with rain falling from the darker clouds that floated miles away. We could see a little pond hundreds of feet below us, and the granite rocks we were sitting on shone in the mottled sunlight as white clouds passed overhead. Alicia and I sat quiet for a long time, enjoying the warmth and quiet interrupted by a bird now and then. God was surely with us.