Mountains make us small

"We sleep well with tired bodies. And day by day, with ironic twists, and sometimes painful breaking and reshaping, we live adventure.
How do you live adventure where you are?"

That's a quote from a blog post I read a few days ago, and today I find it quite true. You sleep well with a tired body, you eat well with a hungry stomach, and you laugh well with a light heart. As for how I live adventure where I am, I try to open my hands physically and mentally every morning and allow whatever comes my way to be seen as a gift that God is giving to me. 

Some days are easier than others to recognize these gifts, and today in particular was one of the easier days. Besides, a day that starts out with making pancakes and blueberry smoothies is quite promising, wouldn't you agree?

Out of the blue (literally out of the blue: it was brilliantly blue between the sky and lake today), we get invited to join some friends for a hike. After months and months of being cooped up during the Winter, how can you resist the chance to get outside and do something? 

So 3 o'clock found us leaping up unevenly spaced steps and a little out of breath. I've been needing to hike, to experience challenging my body after countless hours of sedentary studying. And it felt so good to move. So as to span muddy stretches of trail, I put all my limited ballet expertise to use and made a jeté across a mud splotch. My sneakers and legs were soon splattered with a little mud, but it felt cool and refreshing. It's especially intriguing when you do a jump across mud downhill because you can't be sure if you'll be able to slow yourself from the momentum which might result in a few more mud splatters and a lot more fun.

I'm always astounded at the beauty of nature and the human body. Nature speaks the brilliance of God's glory. I see it in the sun rays that lay carefully on virescent moss, in the gushing of a waterfall, the soaring of a bird, and the tangled tree roots that I grasped onto. God created us to exert ourselves, to enjoy the challenging moments of stair climbing and the exhilarating seconds of downhill leaping. We feel the drain in our muscles as we push them a little bit farther right before we sense the satisfaction in reaching a peak. Getting to the top is more than just visually rewarding, it's a also a microscopic experience going on within your body. A party of sorts, a celebration of the rush of air and epinephrine. 

I'm so thankful God created us to get tired. It's an odd thing to think about, but that's really what makes something so challenging so rewarding: you get tired. You sleep well. And the realization that we can't do everything and we need to rest and recharge is a humanizing thing. 

Because we aren't super humans and we can't do everything. 

Whether it comes to mountains or to-do lists, we're not conquerers. There's always something more to do, experience, or something more to push our bodies through. Yet we get out of breathe and if it weren't for things like resting, we wouldn't know our own vulnerability. We wouldn't realize our dependency on God. 

 We can play around with our accomplishments and think that they're something amazing...

But really, they're just mud in the end...little glops of mud that we're proud of.

So if our accomplishments end up in a dust heap, then how do we live our lives? Daring to be adventurous is daring to see that you're small and puny next to God's awesomeness. And you know what? I think I'm okay with that. Especially if it means more days like today.