Quiz: Are You Good at Choosing Joy?
The beauty of a literal mountaintop experience is something I wanted to see more than once. A few years after the first time, we decided to hike the same mountain but take a trail on the other side. That one was supposed to be more challenging. The challenging part was finding the trail. First, the GPS tried to kill us. It took our minivan over some narrow, winding mountain roads no minivan was meant to trek. Then our map was wrong. I don’t like maps now. We wandered on a trail that wasn’t on the map for about an hour before we found the trail that was on the map.
There had also been unexpected rain earlier in the day. Because of all the delays, we started the hike much later than planned. But our time constraints hadn’t changed. We had a long drive home. Sleep is important. There was school the next day, the first day of a new school year as a matter of fact. I had to set a deadline for turning back. We started up the trail knowing that we had to turn around at 5 pm whether we had made it to the top or not. I was worried we were going to miss the top and hear about that disappointment for the rest of my life. The kids were not worried. They were quite sure we’d get to the top, and they set a brisk - nearly running - pace towards that goal. Then I was worried I would trip over a root and spend the rest of my life hearing about the time someone had to carry me off the side of a mountain.
One of the kids kept yelling in Latin for the rest of us to hurry up. One of the kids kept looking back to see how far behind Dad was. I was kind of worried he was going to be the one to trip. I can’t carry him. All the while, I kept looking at my watch. We seemed to be getting close to the top as we got close to the deadline. What was I going to do if we were only a few minutes away? I knew I couldn’t change my mind because I really wouldn’t know how far away the top was until we were at the top.
Then there was a ladder on the trail. The “hike” suddenly involved climbing a vertical rock at least twice my height. Some people say they are afraid of heights and mean they are uncomfortable standing at the edge of a cliff. It’s perfectly normal to be afraid of a fall that will kill you. I have the far less normal fear of heights where I can’t go more than two rungs up a ladder before every muscle in my body trembles and my heart tries to escape my chest. The rest of the family scrambled to the top and began yelling about how close we were, both to the top of the mountain and our deadline for turning back.
I’m not entirely sure how I made it up the ladder (or back down later), but I guess I’ve always been more stubborn than anything. There was a cloud sitting on the top of the mountain. We stepped onto the summit into that cloud at exactly 4:59 pm. One of the kids burst into song. We enjoyed about thirty seconds of awesome before we started back. The kids didn’t mind the quickness of the top because they already had a new goal of getting down the mountain faster than we’d gone up.
I kept the memory of awesome close as I resumed carefully watching my steps. But it hit me that God actually felt closer when I fought the fear of climbing. He was there in the good where I hoped to find him, and he was there when I was bruising my shins clinging to a ladder of difficult. I should have seen that coming. And given that we were trying to reach the top of a mountain, I should have seen my fear of heights coming, too.