The Crack That Echoed Across the Fjord

In Glacier Bay, Alaska, tourists gather each summer near Margerie Glacier — a wall of blue-white ice towering twenty-one stories above the waterline. For long stretches, nothing happens. Then a sound like a rifle shot echoes across the fjord. Then another. Then a deep, groaning crack that seems to come from inside the earth itself.

A column of ice the size of a ten-story building sheers away from the glacier face and plunges into the sea. The crash is deafening. A wave surges outward. The tour boat rocks. No one speaks. A little girl grips her father's hand and whispers, "Is it angry?"

Her father kneels down. "No, honey. It's just that powerful."

David understood that feeling. In Psalm 29, he heard the voice of the Lord in the thunderstorm — a voice that breaks cedars, shakes the wilderness, strips forests bare. Seven times he names it: "the voice of the Lord." Not a whisper. Not a suggestion. A force that reshapes the landscape itself.

But here is what David celebrates at the psalm's close: the same God whose voice shatters ice and splits mountains turns toward His people and speaks one final word — peace. "The Lord gives strength to His people; the Lord blesses His people with peace." The voice that commands glaciers also comforts children. That is our God.