THE MOUNTAIN

Today I’ve been mulling over and pondering the great spiritual mountain that I’ve been climbing all my life. Even as a child I can remember the call, though I didn’t know what it was, it was just a feeling, something calling me beyond the powerless place I found myself in every day; drawing me, sometimes dragging me, it seemed, to another harsh challenge.

I guess us humans, of all races and nationalities often, see our spiritual path as a mountain because it is often so arduous, difficult and steep in the beginning, in the middle and at the end. But, today I see a different metaphor for my quest for my salvation and my father’s truth:

Today, I don’t see myself so much as climbing a mountain as I see myself building a mountain; every time I’ve fallen and gotten up, every time I’ve been humbled and rejected and gotten up, every epiphany that rose up in me from a struggle with a bad choice I’d made, and the cowardly years I withdrew into alcohol have been brutal lessons; hewn out stones of struggle that form this rising mountain I now stand on in Christ’s healing light.

I know my Father’s mansions, my inheritance awaits me and this whole idea of mountains and struggle will cease to bruise my head and feet; I will arrive at the feet of God for I’ve learned God is my sufficiency in all things and I just keep trying to do the next right thing……… Finally, the stones, the building blocks of my life, are beginning to come to me by grace and not so much in painful, bruising struggles.

Jack