When my family vacationed in the Banff, Canada region last week, we went on many hikes through canyons, around lakes, up mountains, and along streams in the forest.

As we walked, I frequently made an effort to see Spirit expressed in what we saw along the way. And it was not hard to do, the landscape was so beautiful, awesome and even tranquil.

Along one stream, we came upon a rock that was “alive.” It was growing right before our eyes. This fascinated me, because I had never thought of rock as growing. It’s always been associated in my mind as void of life, empty of activity..more than dormant…I suppose…dead!

The concept of a rock with life intrigued me, because many times in the Christian Science practice, I’m faced with situations that appear void of life. For example, a client calls and describes a business that has no customers, no income, no hope, no future—an appearance of death. Or a married person calls and says his or her marriage is falling apart—a picture of death. Or someone has a health problem that seems to sap evidence of life from that individual’s face and body.

Anyway, finding life in a most unexpected place reminded me that we live in a universe of life. God is Life. Everything of God expresses life. Metaphysically considered, even a rock, as God’s idea, expresses life. And along that stream was bustling evidence of this truth, in one form. The wall of rock was alive, growing and increasing in size and stature as water trickled over its surface.

I realized later that all the rocks I saw, in the mountains the hills and the valleys, expressed life too. They were evidence of might, authority, beauty, grandeur, peace, and hope and promise of things even greater than of the terrestrial with their peaks stretching mightily upward into the heights of the sky.

Life is everywhere. There is no death, no inactivity, dormancy, or void in the universe of Mind we occupy. The more we look, the more we find, even in a rock.