I was driving into the mountains on two separate occasions with two different friends and experienced a singular epiphany. Driving out of Denver into the massive Rockies can evoke a kind of honest fear that is not allotted words. My friend had never seen these towering mounds and was quietly looking to the horizon trying to remember to breath. I had a similar thing going on but was looking for words that would convince him things were going to be okay. He was thinking, “Oh crap what did I get myself into?” At the same time I was thing, “Oh crap how to I tell him what I just got us into?” Because, truth be told, I wasn’t sure if things were going to be okay. A friend hiked half the Appalachian Trail not to long ago and when I was talking to him on the phone while he was 400 miles in and he described how terribly hard the whole thing had been. He wasn’t sure if he would have signed on had he known the reality of situation. The mountains and the ocean share an ominous bigness that dwarfed any ideal that we could make up… they crush our boxes.
My friend Steve said something to me one time that was double edged. He is a teacher and so it is no surprise that what he said had layers to it. He said something like, “Dave your are such a free spirit, but learn how to take others with you.” Or as my friend Jon said it, “Your easy to like and hard to love.” I want to bring people to mountain tops to invite them to breathe the clear air and feel the wind in their hair-to rest in places that storms lay claim to.
I was alone the other day on a mountain top, resting-thinking-praying for a word from God. I had this little green prayer book and was reading through Psalm 51 slowly. I was processing what I means to invite others to experience the hills and life as a whole-the way it comes to us. Then these words landed like a ton of bricks.
stablish me with your free spirit.
These were words I could pray. The stiff King James rendering opened me to see the paradox. How odd it is to be established, or stablished as they once said it, in a free God. God’s freedom is something, like the mountains and the ocean, that is terrifying. Yet, it is something we are invited to be established in. The free God of the exodus is the one who parts seas and subverts the establishments. The divine reorders the world and reorders us freely as the winds blow. But to be established, to have your footing enough to rest in the openness of exposed ridges, that is a place I want to take people. To see their joy and fear and identify in those moments with them.
