"And breathe,.. just breathe." ~Anna Nalick
I wanted to punch him in the face.
Here
we are climbing the most challenging mountain I have ever attempted, and my
college friend Paul has the nerve to start obnoxiously singing.
This
is no ordinary mountain we are talking about. This is Cerro Negro, one of the great
volcanos of Nicaragua. It is completely covered in black ash, heated by the
blazing sun. And this volcano was kicking my butt.
At first glance,
the volcano may not look too bad. But
when you actually start to climb it (on all fours), you quickly learn that the
ash makes it difficult to get any traction.
If you crawl three steps up, you’ll slide back down two steps. After the first half hour of climbing, I assumed
we must have made some good progress. However, when I looked down, I saw that we
had barely moved a few yards up the mountain.
How
long was this going to take?
Now,
there have been many times I’ve been hiking with friends and enjoyed singing a
Disney show tune or something like “Hey
now, you’re an all-star” through the woods.
But when you’re on all fours struggling to climb a volcano of hot ash,
in 100+ degree weather, feeling like you’re going to die, singing is the last
thing I care about. Which is why I was
so angry with Paul when he starting singing not Disney, but chanted prayers up
the volcano (btw, Paul’s kinda religious).
“What
are you doing?” I said to him.
“It
helps,” Paul said. “Try it. Pray while you climb; it helps.”
I’m
not in the mood, Paul.
I
went back to climbing. Three steps up
and I slid back down. Three more steps
and I slid back down again. I wasn’t going anywhere!
I
got so frustrated I decided to gather all my energy and bolt as fast as I could
up the mountain, leaving the singing fool in the dust. For a half second, it looked like it might
work. Then all of my strength evaporated,
and I slid down farther back from where I began.
Well,
that was stupid.
#
Have
you ever felt like sometimes when you try to take a step forward you end up
sliding right back to where you started? In our lives, we can get frustrated
when we perceive we are making little progress.
But the good news is that Jesus is with us on the mountain, and he is
saying, “Don’t beat yourself up. Pray. We’ll get there.” Rather than despairing about how far we are
from the top, Jesus encourages us to be patient with ourselves and focus just
on the next three steps.
Our
progress meter is not the same as Jesus’.
He measures with a different measure (Matt 7:2). We often put expectations
on ourselves that God never meant for us to carry. Sometimes, we are harder on
ourselves for “not getting our act together fast enough” than we would ever be
toward a person we love (Brown, 2012). We must practice patience with ourselves
and put our faith in God: His timing and His progress in us. St. Paul writes, “For we have been
saved by hope. But a hope which is seen
is not hope. For when a man sees something, why would he hope? But since we
hope for what we do not see, we wait with patience”
(Rom 8:24-25).
After
my failure, I decided to listen to my friend. I crawled three steps and stopped
to take a quick breath, praying quietly all the while. Then I repeated the
cycle again. It actually did help to
take my mind off the volcano. When the ash caused me to slide down, I didn’t
get angry but accepted it as part of the process.
Eventually, to my
great relief, we reached the top. My friend and I laughed together as we gazed
across the landscape from on high. I will always remember that as one of the
greatest moments of my life.
Go
figure. The singing volcano climber was
right about something.
#
Written by Joey Martineck
First posted at Beautiful Things: http://www.joeymartineck.blogspot.com/
Names changed for privacy.
Brene Brown, Ph.D., LMSW. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be
Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead: Penguin
Group (New York, 2012), 75.
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