I wondered for a long time why I loved the mountains so much. I think about them, long to go there, look at pictures and videos of them. I have an emotional feeling come over me sometimes when I think about them and almost always while I am there. The mountains mean something to me deep inside.
We rented horses once when we were little kids. A stable in the mountains while on a family vacation. In my young male mind these were rugged mountain horses. This was going to be a simple and standard trail ride up and back down. Easy kid, touristy stuff. It was the unplanned sudden hailstorm that spooked the horses, and mine bolted across the field. I wrecked at the end just before a barbed wire fence. It was pretty scary.
Another time we were camping on a mountain side and a storm roiled into the valley below. From the clouds a tornado dropped, and we watched it tear up hay fields and power lines. I was terrified and kept asking my dad, “What do we do if it comes up here?” He said, “Just lay in that ditch, it will go right over you.” Ha, okay. But I was so scared.
Then there was the time I almost died. I was hiking a trail on a mountain and thought I would cut across a scree field (loose rock on a mountain). I started to slide and put my hands down to stop myself. It seemed like the sliding went on forever. I slid right up to the edge of a drop off. I was little so it was probably not as far as it looked to me then, or maybe it was. My palms were trashed as well as my knees and elbows. Torn up. I don’t remember Mom or Dad being too upset; I still think it was near death.
So why would I be drawn into all this? Why would 30, 40, 50 years later I be affected so deeply? The longing for all of us is to be loved. From the day you were born, maybe before, you needed to be loved. Being loved as a child paints a wide swath across your heart. It takes up residency. In those early years when my family was together, I felt loved. Those nights in the tent, around the campfire, in the station wagon, at the rest stops and Holiday Inn, I felt family, together. Even though now I know it was not the fantasy family I imagined, it doesn’t have to be that to own a place in our hearts. It is amazing how little we will grasp on to or fantasize as being real.
There is an old cowboy saying, “You can’t fix a broken wagon wheel, but you can use the parts to build a new one.” So along the trail, I have assimilated the parts of a broken childhood and early adulthood that were good and built a new life. The life my kids will know. One where their parents saw them, heard them, chased Jesus, and loved them deeply. Parents who stayed together through the hard times and were there when they felt they were slipping over the edge in a field of life scree.
Even after all the years of cloaking my emotions with chemicals, work, and promiscuity, I found my way to the core of who I longed to be. Jesus will use the old parts to build us up new. It is what he does, and it is what our hearts have longed for all along, and the gift we can offer the next generation. TJ/KOZ
