This might be the beginning of a series called “the sorry mom series.” Sometimes when you’re on the world race things happen that are just…well…wicked sketchy. And seeing as I’ve been humorously nicknamed “the sketchiest world racer” (by myself and others) these situations seem to happen to me quite a bit. From being at launch a day early and sneaking around the hotel, to being asked for drugs by the man who stamped my passport coming into swaziland, these things just seem to fall into my plate. Not the best dish to have on my plate, but I will eat it, because it was given to me, and I don’t want to be rude. This is the story of my african jungle adventure.
We arrived at the beautiful mountaintop where El Shaddai Children’s Home (elshaddaiswazi.org) is located and were told about a waterfall that was somewhere nearby. We had already heard of this waterfall from previous teams that have been to that location, so needless to say we were all excited about the waterfall.
So one day my friends Tellus Truesdale, Brian Corder, Joe De Leon, and myself decide that we will find the waterfall. As men. Manly men. So we ask one of the guys who lives/works there (his name was Benele) how to get to the waterfall. He tells us “OH ITS EASY! just go down the hill to the valley and walk to the right and keep going down until you find the river.” CAKE. So we start our walk down the mountain.
We walked down to the first valley with no problem. Once we got past that though, our walk started getting steeper and steeper, and the bush started getting thicker and thicker.
It started getting so steep that we were just climbing down this thing. Trying our very best not to slip and slide down the mountain to certain death.
There were thorny bushed absolutely everywhere, and we were all getting cut up. I cut my knee and had blood running down my leg. Not too much fun.
We knew were getting close because we started to hear the sound of the river, when all of a sudden we hear our friend Tellus, who was far ahead of us, yell “WOAH!”
“What is it Tellus?” we asked “Do you see the river?”
“Uuuuum…yeah” he replied “Its just at the bottom of this cliff”
Yeah the Cliff…So this cliff is probably about 20 feet tall and there are thorny plants everywhere. One of the things we had to hold onto to climb down was a wrist thick vine with two inch thorns all over it. We had to climb down a tree, hold onto that thorny death vine, swing over to another tree, climb down that, walk on a dead fallen tree, and we were down the cliff. Sounds easy…but it was freaking terrifying.
SO after the long ordeal of getting down the cliff, we find ourselves in some deep african jungle, and it was AMAZING.
It was like being on the LOST island. Everything was untouched and it looked like maybe humans had never even been there.
We walked downstream for a bit and found no waterfall, so we started walking upstream for a while and all of a sudden…there she was.
Glorious, majestic, falling water…okay its was kinda tiny but we had FOUND THE WATERFALL! So Joe and Tellus went swimming despite the rumors of an anaconda style boa constrictor living in that pond, and we celebrated.
After our celebration, naturally, we had to head back home to the top of the mountain. So we climbed the waterfall and tried to find the path we had heard about and clearly not taken.
We searched for a while and eventually found a very sketchy path back up the very steep mountain, and after a long arduous walk full of panting and pain we got back to the top of the mountain where our hut was.
One big thing i learned from this experience is to appreciate being in process. Finding the waterfall was the smallest part of the adventure, even though it was the main goal. Everything else we did was where all the best parts of the adventure happened. Yeah we got a very satisfying sense of accomplishment when we got to the waterfall, but that accomplished feeling would have been much less satisfying if we hadn’t had the hard journey to get there. A lot of the time we find ourselves in the process of doing something or getting somewhere. We’re always working at achieving some goal, and we hate being on the journey there and wish we would just get to the end already. But in doing that we miss out on the parts of life where we learn the most. The “final destinations” of life, let’s say, are just points on the path. The smallest parts. Life is actually all the other stuff that happens in between those points. As christians we tend to think that we need to arrive at one of those points spiritually before God can use us to do his work, but that’s not true. He wants to use us in our process, right in the middle of all that growing, when we’re all broken and bruised. That is how people can relate to us, because everyone is usually in process, on their way to a final destination. Cause, let’s face it, we dont have it all together. And anyone who says or thinks they do have it all together, is kind of a pain to be around.
So my challenge to you is to be cool with being in process. Because thats where life happens, not in the destinations. And when it gets hard and you’re right in the middle of climbing down a cliff, remember that those moments make achieving your goal (or finding your waterfall if you will) a whole lot sweeter.
I am still $1500 away from reaching my next deadline which is coming up on December 1st! So if you would like to run this race with me (and make sure i finish) please click on the “Support Me” button in the sidebar to make a donation. ANYTHING HELPS! and anything is immensely appreciated! thanks!
