Mountain View

I’ve never been an outdoorsy kind of girl.

In primary school when we’d have free afternoons to run around in the field and be children (pity this hardly happens anymore), I’d be the kid seated under a tree completely lost in the world of Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys.

Decades later and my idea of a good time still revolves around indoor inactivity. Keywords: Indoor and inactivity. Couch potato all the way.

So I didn’t have to think even once about joining my workmates on their Mt. Kenya expedition last year. Why? Allow me to point out the obvious. It’s a mountain. A M-O-U-N-T-A-I-N. Beyond the strenuous outdoorsiness of it all, this indoor girl likes to keep close proximity to the ground when she’s on her feet.

Yet, in typical divine irony, our church community is in a season of ascending the mountain of worship. I didn’t get it at first. Not really. Climb Mt.Kenya? Who? Me? *insert comical laughter* Climb Mt. Worship? Sure, no biggie.

As my workmates prepared for Mt. Kenya, I was preparing for Mt. Worship. Sorting through my life luggage with the Holy Spirit as my travel guru. Making sure I’m not hauling around any unnecessary baggage.

But there’s only so much preparation you can do before it’s D-day. And ready or not, it’s time to start the climb.

It didn’t take long for me to realise a fundamental error I had made. An assumption that in hindsight seems far too obvious to have missed.

Spiritual mountains are just as hard to climb as physical ones.

They embed a deep burn in your muscles. They yank the breath out of you. You just can’t take it all on at a go – there are stop points along the way. And somewhere in the chaos of it all you begin to wonder if your preparation was just a figment of your imagination. You begin to wonder what possessed you to take on a mountain in the first place…is getting to the summit even worth it any more?

In this season, I’m learning a lot about mountain climbing. I’m digging deep into myself…into places I didn’t even know existed. I’m pressing further into God’s presence in measures that surprise me.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of all? The breathtaking beauty of every resting point on the way to the top. To be standing there, looking out, and to realise that getting to this place was hard…it was HARD…but this view…this place…is worth every single step.

Me? A mountain climber? LOL. Only God.