Hike

Mountain-climbing imagery.  I've been noticing a lot of it lately. 

Is this truly a pattern to be noticed or is it merely coincidence or the result an over-active imagination?

Really, after the undeniably ubiquitous desert imagery, I am hoping I'm just imagining all the mountain-climbing imagery. After the desert, I want oasis.  Rest, refreshment, shade.  Not a hike, and definitely not one up a mountain.

My husband, king of the Mountain!  At Ptarmigan Pass in 1995

But I do love to hike... up mountains even.  When I was in my twenties (before children) and was spending several summer weeks taking seminary intensives in Colorado, I hiked a few fourteeners.  I even hiked three in one day.  (Actually four, but the dip to the saddle between one of these mountains and the others was not great enough for it to count as a true fourteener.  At the time, it definitely felt like it should count, but I digress...)

These mountains bear noble and slightly intimidating names: Lincoln, Democrat, Princeton, Quandary...  Names you want to work into conversation later.  "Well, when I was hiking Mt. Bross..."  

The reason I like hiking mountains is because it doesn't require a great deal of athleticism and skill.  (Some mountains do, of course, but not the ones I dare to scale.)  More than anything, it demands tenacity and patience and plenty of water.  Camaraderie also helps, as does a readiness to enjoy the journey, even the difficult stretches.

Hiking with small group friends near Breckenridge in 2008

Perhaps this is why I was so captured by Nathan Foster's depiction of hiking with his father in Wisdom Chaser (also mentioned here).  Foster scoffs when his dad speculates that if they hike slowly and steadily, they won't need to stop as often.  So though his father "moved his feet methodically, slow but steady," Nathan recounts:

I brushed off my father's wisdom and raced ahead up the mountain.  After about a half hour of hiking up a steep pitch, I noticed that, with all my painful stops, he was keeping up with me.  I felt exhausted.  Dad didn't stop even once, and he seemed to be gliding up the mountain. 

As is often the case in life, pain made me teachable. That day it was burning lungs and shaky legs.  My father had a lesson to teach about hard work, and I was ready to learn.  I gave Dad's theory a try and joined his ridiculously slow march.  I soon discovered that if I kept going slowly, it was easier not to stop.  I couldn't believe it....

Eventually we summited with grace and precision and a slow, steady pace.  The destination proved more remarkable than I had remembered from our last climb.... I took a bruised apple from my pack and bit in.  It tasted delicious.  (pp. 34-5)

A slow steady march up the mountain.  Eyes to see the surrounding, ever-changing beauty.  Patience as the journey unfolds.  Anticipation of even greater vistas to come.  And big gulps of water.


Okay,  I think I'm in.

Not a bad way to descend Mt. Bross after a long day of hiking -- 1995

Sela

"The Sela, which often occurs in the middle of a Psalm, is meant to signal a meditative interlude." 

-- Richard Foster in Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home

According to Martin Luther, the Sela requires "a quiet and restful soul, which can grasp and hold to that which the Holy Spirit there presents and offers."

Perhaps...

And amen.

Relinquish

One of my favorite things about yoga is this: If you hold a pose long enough, particularly a stretching pose, at some point your muscles let go and sink deeper into the pose. You think you are stretching your muscles as deeply as possible, but suddenly there's a release and you're able to stretch even further and more comfortably.  Every time this happens to me, I marvel at how tightly my muscles had been clenched without me realizing it and how much more natural the pose feels after they do relax.

Unfortunately, this is not what I look like doing yoga.

For this reason, my favorite yoga style holds stretching poses long enough for the release to occur.  (I'm not so much a fan of holding strength poses for long, but that's a different blog entry.) Sometimes the instructor encourages us to use sinking breathing, to make our exhales last longer than the inhales. It's amazingly effective in helping those muscles let go.

THIS is what I look like doing yoga.

Lately, it seems God's been holding me in a few teeth-gritting "yoga poses."  I haven't understood why entirely.  I was already flexible (I thought), fairly strong (I thought), somewhat peaceful (I thought).  But after holding these poses for several months now, I'm finally beginning to feel my jaw relax a bit and my muscles loosen.  I'm beginning to give in to the pose.  To relinquish...  


This Lenten season is a time of relinquishment for me.  Releasing...

• Reputation – I want to be well-respected and appreciated.  I hate being misunderstood and misrepresented.  (Don't we all?)  But Christ was misunderstood, misrepresented, marginalized.  Should I be different?  I relinquish my reputation.
• Control  –  Though I've never considered myself a control freak (perhaps I'm fooling myself?), I usually make every effort to ensure results turn out the way I think they should.  But hard work and (what I think are) good intentions can only go so far.  I cannot control others and their actions and should not try to do so.  I take my hands off the reins.
• Consequences  –  Consequences themselves are a grace. (Got that from my spiritual director.) Just as negative consequences eventually brought the prodigal son to his knees and to his true home, consequences do the same for us.  If I were to dictate consequences –  my own or others' – they would not be grace.  I choose to let God choose the outcomes.
• The future  –  My dreams, ambitions, hopes, expectations, speculations.  I thought I had found a vehicle to realize many of these, but that was not the case.  I am free from those false hopes.  Possibly, I am also becoming more free from needing to prove myself to myself and to others.  I do not stop walking forward, but I surrender the lead.
• Ministry  –  My usefulness to God, my purpose, my outlet.  So often when I've left one type of ministry, another one awaited. Now I scan the horizon and see only dim, indiscernible shapes. God will make them clearer in time, but until then He'll let me squirm a bit in my "uselessness" as I learn to relax into his unconditional love.

In his book Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home, Richard Foster writes:

The Prayer of Relinquishment is a bona fide letting go, but it is a release with hope.  We have no fatalist resignation.  We are buoyed up by a confident trust in the character of God.  Even when all we see are the tangled threads on the backside of life’s tapestry, we know that God is good and is out to do us good always.  That gives us hope to believe that we are the winners, regardless of what we are being called upon to relinquish.  God is inviting us deeper in and higher up.  There is training in righteousness, transforming power, new joys, deeper intimacy. (p. 52)

*****************************

A creative and artistic friend of mine, who writes a really lovely blog recently hosted a group of moms and daughters for a self-portrait-collage-making session using gel medium transfer.  (I feel a tiny bit impressed with myself for that previous sentence!)  For her own portrait, she used a photograph of herself with her arms out, palms up, and from the photo, she collaged butterflies releasing, flying upward and outward.  

I've thought often about her artwork since then.  Is it possible that as I relinquish my tight grip and release these things, they then become things of beauty and freedom? 

I release with hope.

Trying to Understand

Such a strange day and not an easy one.

An email received.  Venom thinly veiled in terse official language.


The ongoing struggle to understand, to make sense out of inexplicable decisions, actions, words.  Maybe it's because of this...  Maybe it was that....  Could it have been because of this....?


Scenarios imagined.  Explanations speculated.  Stories replayed and replayed.


I don't think we're going to get to understand.  I think we're to walk in faith and dignity and gentleness in the midst of the fog.  We're to find peace in the confusion, peace that flows only from faith.  From a faith that is stretched to capacity, but lengthened and strengthened because of the stretching.


But I did read something interesting this afternoon while waiting in the carpool line, something that resonated with at least one of my speculations.  Nathan Foster writes in Wisdom Chaser of his experience hiking Mount Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado, with his father, Richard Foster:

Somewhere in the haze of our strenuous activity, I remembered a day from the past.  After not being allowed to attend my best friend's birthday party, I had thrown the biggest fit of my life.  I remember standing on my bed, screaming at Dad.  He countered me, doing the stern father thing, and we went back and forth, fighting for power. Then my father did the strangest thing: he knelt down and closed his eyes.  This act enraged me all the more.  I demanded that he get up and fight me.  But his only posture was silence.  What was he doing? Was he being weak?  Shutting me out?  I didn't understand it, but eventually it stopped the fight. (p. 19)

An explanation?  A challenge?  Merely something to consider?  I'm not going to try to know.  


No that's not true.  When my husband arrives home, I'll read the passage to him. And we'll talk and rehash and try to understand.  We'll stay up too late.  Again.


But maybe we'll be that much closer to a posture of silence.  And peace.

The Monster at the End of this Book

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was...

As you can see, it stars lovable, furry Grover from Sesame Street.  Grover has discovered, thanks to the book title, that there is a monster at the end of this very book, and he is downright worried about that.  Page after page, he warns the reader not to turn to the next page. 


As a child, I did not cooperate with his entreaties.  I turned each page gleefully.  Apparently, I was not the only one.


With each new page turn, Grover becomes increasingly insistent, panicked even.  He begs and pleads.  He attempts to tie down the pages with ropes and then with hammers, nails and 2x4's.  He erects a brick wall.  Each consecutive page shows the destruction created as the prior page bursts free from Grover's security measures.


Finally, on the penultimate page, a forlorn Grover makes one final desperate plea.

And yet, I turned the page.  You would have too, I bet.


At the end of the book, there is indeed a monster.  That monster is Grover.




I've thought about this book from time to time over the years, wondering if it is still in print.  


Yesterday, while grocery shopping, when I passed by the book and magazine section, there it was, The Monster at the End of this Book, right there front and center on the rack.


The timing of this discovery was interesting.  I had just received a big blow of bad news.  Nothing earth shattering, thankfully, but the type of lousy news that plays on old insecurities, pains, patterns.  The kind that causes me to doubt myself and God's goodness, that certainly makes me doubt the goodness of those around me.  


The past six months have been challenging and the past month more so.  Yesterday was just the proverbial straw on the camel.  Whether I've liked it or not, circumstances of late have pushed me to dig deep, to reevaluate my life choices, to consider what I want to be about at this point in my life, what God wants me to be about now.  I suppose the early forties is a good age for this sort of thing.


And so, I've been confronting the monsters, those very insecurities, pains and patterns stirred up by yesterday's news.  The stuff that keeps a gal up at night.  I feel myself gripping tightly to what I think is right, wanting to do everything so well that it's beyond criticism, wanting to manage circumstances and people and what those people think.  

I've been wary.  I've focused on the monster at the end of the book.  It is no mistake that I encountered this beloved book all these years later on such a discouraging day.  


Maybe the monsters are really not all that scary after all.  Certainly, there are scary and awful things in the world, but that's all the more reason not to fear the monsters that are not truly scary.  Maybe the monster is me.  That's certainly partly true, but it's not the entire story.  


In seeing the book, I'm reminded to relax and trust the Author, perhaps to even chuckle at my panic and futile security measures.  Maybe with the Author I can blow through some of these pages, the walls, the ropes, to get to a place that is clearly good.  Maybe I'll get to see reality with the Author's eyes.  


I am hopeful, though I still wrestle.  


And I take heart in one other little gem-of-a-message in the Grover book:

Rough-and-Tumble Tea Lover

So, I've been repeatedly peer-pressured by my good friend, "Tea Girl," to start my own blog.  But I've been ambivalent for many reasons, some of which I will post soon (if I do in fact post soon).  Nevertheless, I carved out some time to write a guest blog on her site.  You'll find it below.  


Rough-and-Tumble Tea Lover

On my front porch are a pair of sour-smelling socks, a couple sets of old tennis shoes – also sour-smelling and still half wet – and an old empty trash can.  All are products of my son’s crawdad hunting excursion in the creek down the street.  Whenever a buddy visits, in between the rounds of video games, whenever I insist they find something outside to do, this is the beloved activity.

The floor of my son’s room is littered with Legos.  Actually, that sounds too refined.  It’s carpeted with Legos… and a layer of dust.  I insist he keep one section clear so that I can make it to and from his bed without stifling a curse word, and he insists I not move any Legos in the other areas.  (Because I myself have a deep love for Legos, I’m willing to go along with this plan.)  On his bedside table is a wad of gum almost golf-ball size.  It is a growing wad, added to periodically with freshly-chewed pieces.  Sometimes he chews the whole wad.  I pretend not to know.

As I type, he is teasing our lazy hound dog with a homemade contraption: a pair of football socks dangling by fishing line from the end of a long stick.  He hangs it over the sleeping dog’s face.  Soon the dog is jumping to grab the socks and shake them furiously.  The line breaks.  The dog goes for the stick.  My son goes for more fishing line.  I insist it’s time for bed.

And he insists it’s time for tea.   

I brew a pot of the fragrant tea sent to us last Christmas by our former German exchange student.  Who knows what’s in it – the ingredients are in German.  (Yes, you’re right. Germans know.)   It looks like leafy things with a few flowers and orange rinds.  It smells divine.  I don’t know if I’m brewing the tea correctly (someday I need an official lesson from Tea Girl – hint, hint), but I’ve devised some sort of improvisation that produces a slightly reddish and rather yummy brew.

I pour his in a Dave and Buster’s souvenir mug and add some honey.  Not enough honey if you ask him, but more than enough to feel extravagant to me.  And I add an ice cube and a straw. 

Mine, I drink straight, in a slightly chipped mug given to me by a dear friend.  I love this mug.  It feels silky (if a mug can feel that way) and meaningful, so much so I’m willing to continue using it despite the chip.  The chip, by the way, was acquired when I was sick and Rough-and-tumble tried to surprise me with a cup of tea.  He got the tea right (PG Tips brewed strong with a splash of 2% milk) and he finally remembered not to add sweetener.  But he clanked the mug down on the counter a little too hard leaving a permanent reminder of his good deed.

I carry the mugs up to his room along with a Dallas Willard book tucked under my arm.  He will read his book from the school library and I will read my book.  And we’ll sit together on his denim comforter and sip our tea.   As usual, this is his idea.

These times together give me hope.   Great hope.  Sometimes (often!) moms of rough-and-tumble boys need hope.  And it can be a little hard to come by.

Mr. Rough-and-Tumble imitating one of my favorite poses.

The world looks at rough-and-tumble and often they see disruptive-and-bad.  Heck, lots of times I look at rough-and-tumble and see wild-and-I-am-failing-as-a-mom.  But if I look further – and I try to do this often – I see creative-funny-intelligent-energetic and yes, even kind.  That he is a tea lover has to mean something, right?  That he chipped his sick mother’s mug while making her tea seems promising.   That he is choosing to spend the final moments of his day reading with his mom and sipping tea has got to count for something. 

(Okay, true confession:  what it counts for is reading minutes.  He is trying to rack up as many as possible for school.  If the entire school collects enough minutes, all the teachers will dress up as clowns.  And that he’s gotta see.  Apparently, school administrators understand rough-and-tumble too.)

In the meantime, I will sip and savor… the German tea, the company and the hope.