The other day, Julie, Jesse and I decided to run home from the church where we've been working instead of taking the bus. A small, seemingly insignificant task, you might surmise; how wrong you would be. How wrong we were.
Quito is situated high in the mountains of Ecuador, and our ministry site is a twenty-minute bus ride from our house. All downhill. To put it into perspective, often when we wake up in the morning the clouds are lazily hovering over the city below and we're able to look at them from above, to see the shadows they cast on what seem to be dollhouses and play buildings, to see their puffy tops wisp and twirl across the sky and settle above a sleepy city; a mountain's-eye view, if you will. It's breathtaking and gorgeous as we sit comfortably settled somewhere around 10,000 feet above sea level.
Taking that into account, I'm not sure why the three of us thought it'd be awesome to run up the side of a literal mountain to get home.
Replace the romance of the above description with searing thighs and uncoordinated heaving and you'll get a more accurate picture of how Tuesday afternoon went. Covered in dirt and paint from the day's worth of work, we began strongly as we ran to the main road, running for ten minutes without stopping despite the eyebrow-cocked stares and the giggle-ridden glances from the people on the street as they watched three very white girls splotched with very white paint spatters run by them through the crowded streets. Once we made it to the turn, though, it was all uphill from there. And I mean that most literally.
Not only did the incline go from Richard Simmons to Jillian Michaels, the buses and cars that packed the road beside us were emitting black clouds of pollution that seemed to be perfectly timed with my desperate gasps for air. Fortunately for me and my legs that measure up about three inches short of both Julie's and Jesse's, we were forced to walk when the sidewalk turned into a 6-inch span of dirt next to a sewage ditch full of liquid and trash.
At this point, my heart was pounding. My lungs were cramping. My iPod was playing all of the wrong music. The uphill only got steeper. The buses and cars only reeled dangerously closer to the edge of the road that we were teetering across like inexperienced gymnasts on bad balance beams. The road continued winding, and we continued climbing.
I remember specifically thinking to myself at one point, "I honestly don't know that I can keep doing this," and then God reminded me of a similar lesson I learned this summer.
When you're climbing a mountain, you have three choices.
You can turn around and go back, never reaching your destination. You can give up.
You can stop, never reaching any destination at all, remaining in the same place until you're forced into option one or three.
You can keep going, push through the difficulty and make it. You can press into the challenge.
I was annoyed at the revelation in the moment as my breath seemed to be saying its goodbyes, but I kept walking anyway. I called to mind all that was currently wrong, everything I could complain about, but my legs kept moving. I watched Julie happily jump along in front of me while Jesse somehow managed to keep jogging behind me. My feet slipped and my legs were tired and I felt inferior and tubby and out of shape, but I kept moving.
And then I realized.
We were there. We had made it to the top. We were at the summit, close to home, and even found the energy to run a couple of sprints to finish our workout after 45 grueling minutes of uphill trekking.
Even though I had spent the whole time in my head complaining and wanting to quit, I made it. All of the sudden I was filled with joy (…maybe endorphins…) and realized that life is the same way.
When the going gets tough, you can give up, you can stop, or you can get through it. It doesn't even have to be pretty. It doesn't have to be graceful or easy and you don't even have to like it, but you'll soon notice that if you don't give up, you've made it further along. You're better off than you were. You're somewhere new, somewhere improved, somewhere God was trying to get you.
I looked down on the clouds that puffed across the way and saw the supermarket we had passed early on in our run/walk. I looked down and saw how far we'd made it, even when in the grueling moments of the exercise it seemed like I was getting nowhere.
God always has a summit waiting for us at the top of every mountain we're facing. And it usually has a beautiful view of where we've been, a breathtaking reminder of the challenges we've overcome, a quiet reflection on the places that Grace has pulled us from.
Keep climbing.
m
