I am lucky if I get my 10,000 steps in for the day. And by no means am I a fitness or outdoorsy guy. But in the past month, I have hiked over 100km. That is 50km uphill, sometimes straight up, and 50km downhill. And I know for those older than the internet, these hikes were probably uphill both ways.
On some of these adventures, it was more like doing stairs for 10km straight up rather than a hike. My untrained muscles would shake and my head would tell my body to give up. There were countless moments where I wanted to stop and go back down.
Before each hike I usually set a goal for where I want to end up, normally it is the top of a mountain. This goal gives me hope as a struggle up the trail. I envision the panoramic views and talk to myself “The mountain has a top, it has to… you can do it”.
I often get to talk to people about hope as a fundamental human need. Hope may feel like an abstract concept but all it is is a confident expectation. I expect to get better, for things to change, for healing, for the truth. For hiking, it is the expectation to reach the top. For Christians, it is a confident expectation in the fulfilment of who God is and what he said he will do. There is a lot to hope for in life.
However, I can not hope my way to the top of any mountain. I need the left-right, left-rights of life to move forward. My expectations of where I wanted to be, will not be enough to get me there. So I wonder what is it that keeps us going up the mountain? What leads us to our hope?
Wonder.
Wonder is a human need that I often forget about. In our hyper-visually stimulated world, hardly anything is left up to our imagination. We are not good at wondering about things we can not know.
For me, wonder is looking up at the mountains and thinking about how slow they grow. Its exchanging fingerprints with a passing tree. Wondering who organized the race of water running into a mountain top lake. Wonder energizes me to skip up the rocks so I can peek around the next corner. I hope I get to the top of the mountain, but I wonder what I will see. I wonder what colours the horizon will be wearing and how the wind will feel.
As I was hiking last week, I realized that I had forgotten how to wonder. I forgot how to just stare in awe at God. How to wonder at his plans, his goodness, his grace and mercy. What distracted me from wonder?
Rocks.
It is not normal for me to hike with 50lb rocks but the last time I did. I picked up a huge rock and began to walk. My sweat tripled in volume as well as my tennis-like grunts. The left-right, left rights slowed almost instantly. Not only was the rock extremely heavy, but I realized that all my attention and focus was solely on carrying the rock. I quickly lost all my motivation, and I wanted to quit. My wonder vanished and instead of feeling excited about the next corner, I felt weak and powerless.
I had to stop, there was just no way I could do it. I was scared, I thought if I stopped I would never be able to start walking again. If I stopped then what I was carrying would crush me. In exhaustion, I collapsed in the dirt.
Why am I carrying this rock, if I know that my hope of getting to the top of a mountain does not require me to haul a rock 7km up a mountain?
Why do we carry things we don’t have to?
Because if we reach the top then we get all the praise for doing something impossible. And if we can’t reach our goal then we have an excuse to give up. If we don’t make it there is no wonder why. But then we begin to question if we ever really hoped to make it to the top in the first place. How could we have hope if we chose to carry excuses about why we can’t. Our hope loses its conviction when we carry rocks. Our wonder is squandered.
Is it really better to know why you failed, then to have no excuse not to succeed?
No, but this is a tension in my heart. Jesus died and rose again so that I could have hope to live with him forever. His grace leaves no room for my excuses. He is the hope that doesn’t require me to carry rocks.
He is the wonder that walks with me with every left-right in this life.
Drop the rocks.
He Sends. I Go. 