The Hike, Not Up the Mountain

We were told we were going hiking. 'Yeah, big deal' I thought. I've played soccer for several years and I've gone walking in the woods and at Nelson Ledges. It won't be very hard. The one thing I wasn't expecting was rain. It was a light sprinkle but there was mud puddles everywhere. I only brought one pair of shoes. One white pair I bought in China that I didn't want to dirty. So the majority of my focus,energy, and time was on dodging puddles. Sometimes it took up the entire path so I had to awkwardly step up the tiny dry spots next to trees while I grabbed their branches to keep my balance.

By the end of the hike we had gone 12 miles. All my muscles ached and I had almost no energy. And the worst part about all of this.....we didn't even get to the mountain!! All that hiking and we hadn't even climbed up the mountain yet. The hike was to get TO the mountain.

I didn't like that the hike wasn't even on the mountain. But I thought it was a lot like God We can spend all that time and energy but we never climbed the mountain. In our lives we could start the Christian walk and go through all these things with God and their is still a whole mountain of who God is that we still don't know about or could comprehend.

One thing I noticed about when you are hiking is that nobody cares about what they or other people look like. You can't put up a facade. If you try to look nice you just get sweaty and dirty. If you try to act strong or that you know about hiking when you don't, it will come out. You eventually get to the point where you only have energy to do what you need to do, to continue walking and you have no energy to spend on making yourself look better.

Pastor Christopher told us to think about what a mountain top experience is and what it would take to live on a mountain. When you hike and you forget everything but climbing the mountain. You put off everything that hinders your progress, extra weight or things back in normal, everyday life. To have a mountain to experience back in civilization you must retain that focus and not letting extra weight slow or stop your progress.

We have a mountain top experience when everything in our world is about God. No one else, nothing else. Suddenly, eating, sleeping, caring about what others think about us is irrelevant. Nothing matters but knowing God and seeking after Him. And to maintain that, when we need to go back to civilization, we need to keep that desire for only knowing Him. We go back to school, to work, our friends and we have the same attitude about things like we had on the mountain. It is all useless and a waste of my energy to care about these things.