This past month of the trip, our assigned focus was not relational ministry. Instead, our job was to carry out various physical labor tasks at an international Christian school in La Paz, Bolivia. We plastered walls, sanded desks, pulled weeds, painted every surface, sifted a sandbox, moved gravel piles, and cleaned classrooms. The school was in its summer session, and with no students or teachers wandering around, our work was pretty solitary.
For this reason, the blog post for this month, our final month, is going to be a bit different. Instead of focusing on the stories of our ministry, or the people I’ve met, I’m going to talk about how God gave me a few last minute heart changes, before He sent me home.
Beginning this month, I couldn’t shake the feeling that God still had more to teach me, before the year came to an end. In the midst of our busy schedule, I felt Him calling me to spend time with Him, to truly retreat.
One of the ways I most like to connect to the Father is through nature, so when I was invited on a three day hiking trip to summit a 1128m mountain, at 6088m elevation, I assumed God was calling my adventurer’s heart to adventure with Him. “I’ll meet you on the summit”, I thought.
I packed all my warmest clothes, and headed out the next day.
A few of my friends, along with some random backpackers, crammed into an old convoy and drove an hour and a half on a gravel road that lead us to base camp. We all hopped out to take in the stunning view before us; the view of the beast of a mountain we were about to try to climb.
We ate a delicious, traditional Bolivian lunch, filled up on local altitude sickness remedies, then hiked to the face of a tall glacier, where we would learn how to ice climb.
Crampons in toe and ice axes in hand, we learned how to properly pull ourselves up glaciers, and walk cautiously along steep slopes. Catching on quickly, my pride was soaring, as was my confidence in my ability to make it to the mountain’s summit in the days that followed.
Marking the end of day one, we settled into the cold homemade bunks of the unheated base camp cabin. Due to high altitude, I struggled to breathe fluently, causing me to spend the majority of the night, wide awake, trying to catch my breath.
After a long night, the sun finally broke, and we started our day two ascent. Hiking with 60litre packs up large boulders, scattered with snow, we slowly made our way towards the next milestone of the journey, high camp. Managing to keep pace with the front of our group, I was, again, filled with arrogance and untainted certainty that I would make it to the top of the mountain.
Upon arriving at high camp, around 5pm, we clothed ourselves, four layers thick, ate a dinner of soup and stale bread, and huddled into the metal capsule-hut where we’d lay awake, short of breath and shivering, for the next six hours.
During this second sleepless evening, my restless mind wandered to old prayers I’d been circling for the majority of the year; things He’d taught me a lot about, but things that required more growth, in my heart, regardless :
“God remove the pride that lives in my heart. Give me a humble spirit.”
“Let me walk in an identity that is placed solely in my relationship with You.”
“Grant me a mind that rests for Your direction, idoling long enough to be
certain my own goals are aligning with Your greater plans for me.”
Little did I know, before the sun rose, He’d give me some hard and fast lessons in all three of my requests.
After hours of tossing and turning, around 12:30am, we started to stir out of our sleeping bags. Bedridden with altitude sickness, and exhaustion, two of my friends were unable to join us in the final hike to the top. The rest of us ate some more stale bread for breakfast and filled our water bottles with boiled snow, trying not to think about the floating dirt that swirled around the foggy substance we’d soon be consuming. We strapped on all our gear, and started for the door at about 1:15am.
When we stepped out the entrance of the hut, the cold wind cut our cheeks like sandpaper. I was tethered to a friend, and an impatient, arrogant guide that insisted on referring to the two of us in derogatory, chauvinistic terms, despite our repeated requests that he not.
In the dead of night, with only the dim beams of our headlamps, the three of us started for the summit, in trail of the other tethered pairs, within our group. As we started out, feeling only mild nausea, from the altitude, and the comments from our pig of a guide, I was just as sure as ever of my upcoming ‘victory’.
However, as time passed, though our pace was slow, one heavy boot sinking into the shin-deep snow, after the other, I struggled to keep up, continuously fighting to pass air into my lungs.
Frustrated, and unable to breathe properly, I hesitantly agreed to switch guides, being paired, alone, with an older, kind gentlemen, that, to my knowledge, spoke no English. I immediately felt more at ease, and the two of us continued on, in silence, aside from my irregular breaths.
Remembering the reason I came in the first place, I opened up in prayer dialogue with the Father, as we slowly, but surely made our way upward. I suddenly felt prompted to stop, to turn from the massive shadow of a mountain that stood before me, and look at His stars, His milky way, that shown so clearly in that untainted night sky, lying just behind me. At first, unwilling to make such an outlandish request of my guide, and wanting to keep time in order to summit by sunrise, I barreled on, in disregard.
But as my breaths became more and more shallow, and His request hung there, unrelenting, I shamefully tugged on the rope that tied me to the guide, to warn him I was going to stop. In response to the confused look on his face, I said “Nosotros paramos, por favor?”. He nodded in agreement and I turned from him to face the brilliant sky above me, admiring the artwork of my Creator. “Mirar a la estrellas. Estas bonito, no? Dios es bien!”, I said, trying to explain my strange behavior, with what very little Spanish I knew.
After a few moments passed, my unimpressed guide suggested we keep moving. Satisfied with appreciation, and not wanting to look more foolish than I’d already managed to, I agreed to continue on. But not even ten minutes later, I felt called to pray with this quiet man that was tied around my waist.
Frustrated with the idea of wasting any more time, but unwilling to ignore a prompting to pray with a heart that may need it, I reluctantly tugged on the rope that bound us, once more. The guide stopped short, and I hustled to reach him, several paces ahead of me. Trying to warn him of the weirdness of what I was about to request, I said, in between breaths, in the poorest Spanish on Earth:
“Yo tengo (breath, breath) una pregunta (breath, breath) para tu…(breath, breath, breath) Es un pequino different.”
“Mmm.”, He grunted in response.
“Okay, uh, (breath) tu sabe Dios?”, I asked awkwardly.
“Que?”
“Uh, Yo amor Dios, y tu?”, I somehow continued to make the situation more awkward yet.
“Uh…Si.”, he responded, lacking enthusiasm.
“Umm, okay, okay…Esta bien si yo oracion con tu?”
*Silence*
“O, no?”, I asked, uncomfortable with his lack of an answer.
We stood there for a few moments, and then, without breaking his stoic demeanor, he nodded, just once, as if to humor me with his approval. And, so, I grabbed his gloved hands, held them in mine, and began to pray with this fifty year old mountain man, on the side of a snow capped slope in Bolivia, at 4:00 in the morning. God’s insane.
I prayed that he knew God as a friend, and walked throughout life with him. I prayed that he found enjoyment in his work, and that God protected his body as he challenged the harsh conditions of the mountain, several times a week. As I prayed, mostly in English, I tried to throw in words like “amigos”, “esposa”, “ninos” and “salud”, I wanted him to know I was praying for him, and for his life.
As I finished, with the typical South American closing, “En le nombre de Jesus, Amen.” The burly little man squeezed my hands and turned around to start us on our way, again. I was beyond pleased. I was obedient to what I felt was being asked of me, and I could feel that this was the last thing I needed to do. With that out of the way, I could summit the mountain, I thought…
But then, only minutes later, God began urging me to turn down; to turn around, and go back down the mountain…What?! Shaking my head in disbelief and refusal, I pushed forward, questioning why He had brought me out here.
‘You created me to be an adventurer, an achiever, to push passed all discomfort, even reason, to reach accomplishment in a goal. You made me to crave crazy, strange experiences, and I invite You into them, so why are You asking me to abandon this one?’
My confused monologue went on in my head, for a few more minutes, before God stopped my racing thoughts with sudden clarity-
“I did create you to desire crazy, strange experiences, but I did so, in order to call you to crazy, strange places, where others might not go, so that you could bring glory to My name, not glory to yourself, with your relentless achievements. You can’t find your identity in your ability to jump off a bridge, swim on the edge of a waterfall, or summit a mountain. Your identity is not an adventurer, your purpose is to adventure, in order to bring Me to a place, another might not, to bring My name to people who might not know Me. I brought you out here to pray with this man, that was the reason. Now it is finished, so follow Me back down, your summit doesn’t matter.”
Talk about a ‘mic-drop’.
He waited until the eleventh hour, of our eleventh month, but in the dead of night, on the icy face of a mountain in Bolivia, He managed to humble me beyond my own belief, shake my identity to the core, and challenge me to submit to His will, in a very tangible way.
And so, at say, 5400m up, I gave up my goal, in order to physically acknowledge, that His was enough.
On the way down, I couldn’t help but laugh. I’m not sure I would have made it anyways, my breathing completely out of hand, and my body exhausted, but I know, out of my own selfish pride, I would have tried, had He not humbled my heart and set me free of the identity I’d decided to cling to; had He not encouraged me to choose His path, rather than my own.
Another climber in our group turned around that night, as well, making it only three in our group, of seven, that made it to the summit that morning. As I was arriving back at high camp, and I imagine those three were submitting, my guide pulled me aside and said, in broken English, “God very important to you, yes?”. “Yes, very.”, I responded, “And to you too.”, I added. He shook my hand, looked at me with his tired eyes, and walked away. That was the last time we spoke.
We don’t always get to “summit” (get the best career, live life on our timeline, have the perfect family) but if we’re willing to set aside what looks like success to the world,and abandon it for what we know is success in His eyes, we can trust that God has something better, something more rich, and more wonderful for our lives, than we could have ever dreamed up on our own.
