If you spent your life building the extraordinary cliff homes on Mesa Verde, you probably wouldn’t want to pack up and move away. But the Ancestral Puebloans did just that. Archaeologists believe there were about 30,000 Ancestral Puebloans in 1200. But by 1280, they were gone. It was almost as if someone had snapped two fingers and made them disappear. They may have been driven off by a terrible drought and war.

We can’t be sure the ancient Puebloans moved from present-day Colorado to present-day New Mexico. Even if they did, it’s only a 170-mile trip. You could make that trip in a car in a few hours. Does the ancient Puebloan story really matter for your life?

Knowing about ancient Puebloan turkey bones might not change what you eat for breakfast or what you do when you grow up. (Unless you think the story is so cool you become a park ranger at Mesa Verde. Now there’s an idea . . . .)

But here’s the great thing about history. God wrote it. It is His story. He cares about all of it—every letter, word, and chapter. He designed each nook and cranny to tell the story of His plan for the universe. And there are a lot of nooks and crannies. God designed us to be like Him. Like Him, we naturally see that people’s lives and stories matter. We could spend forever studying His work!

Wouldn’t you like to visit the stone homes in Mesa Verde Park, or meet a Pueblo Indian in New Mexico? That kind of curiosity is a great thing—one of the best parts of living in God’s world.