We stopped the car on the side of a mountain. A stream bubbled below us. Its cadence joined the chorus of beeping jeeps carrying villagers back home. We were on our way home, too — back to the city, to the big blue house on the hill. We had been marinating in our weird for too long and were in desperate need of bathrooms. Some disappointment surfaced when the bathrooms available were of the hole-in-the-ground variety, but our murmurs simmered on a low flame.
The cokes and cheeseballs vanished in minutes. The warmth of the sun coaxed out dormant smiles framed with orange dust. We leaned back in plastic patio chairs, tossing jokes across the table. Hunger lingered, casting visions of heaping plates of chow-mien and chicken momos. When they came, the dishes performed the same vanishing act as our starter snacks.
We dragged full-bellies to the stream and carried our contentment across a suspension bridge. The vibrating metal gave my anxiety a place to land. I followed the laughter of my children, their joyful abandon contagious. I kept my eyes on the school-age sojourners, amazed by their resilience.
They touched ground on the other side and started back to meet me in the middle. “Don’t look down,” I thought and did it anyway. The brook running beside the stream captured my attention. It flowed quickly until it forked, its excess feeding the river. What was left behind moved toward lush cornfields.
The manmade brook has been pushed away from the larger water source to sustain life. It yields valuable vegetation to feed hungry children and provide income for workers toiling barefoot in the sun.
It is no longer a part of the larger body. It has a flow of its own.
“What happened here?” my husband asks a group of women stacking freshly dried bricks into tall, orderly rows. The bridge we planned to cross lay mangled in the river. Colorful instant-noodle packets and discarded clothing pile up, supported by the unexpected wreckage.
“The bridge collapsed.” A woman answered, holding comments about our kids to convey the information we needed.
“When?”
Right now is the literal translation of her answer. We were standing here right now and not a single interesting thing was happening. It could have been this morning. It could have been last week. We will never know.
“You can make it,” she said, gesturing how I could crawl to the other side of the river with my five-year-old on my back. We didn’t even wave when we whipped around and went back the way we came.
Our plan B was a park boasting a deep cave and a zipline. Neither attraction was open. We found a shady picnic spot with cool, green benches tucked under a cohort of trees. After lunch, our kids lumbered around large rocks perfect for climbs and posed pictures.
Behind the rocks, a steep path of clay stairs spiraled toward the pad-locked cave. The stairs would have split, one side viewing another portion of the river. A landslide had washed that side out. Three stairs and then — mountainside. We crept along stairs still in tact. Next-level mom-anxiety bore down. I couldn’t look at the river for more than a few seconds before images of disaster disrupted peaceful thoughts. I called out warnings as we neared the bottom. I gripped rusty rails. My hands returned to me orange, foreign. When did this become so hard?
Right now.
We are preparing for a trekking trip into the Himalayas. My kids are excited. I am excited, but I am also assessing risk. I am packing foot creams and pain killer, altitude sickness medication and bandages. I have a gallon size-zip lock bag of rehydration powders and coffee. Because when you’re dealing with altitude adjustment, the last thing you want is a caffeine headache.
Our backpacks fill too fast. Can you carry this? Is this too much? What do we really need? I can only guess. I can only pray that we will have what we need when we need it.
I take measures to alleviate the suffering I know will come when we’re wearing the same shoes for 8 hours on mountain trails and haven’t had a hot shower in a week. There’s only so much I can do. The rest I will leave to my kids. Will they step up? Will we only remember the whiny times? How long will the granola bars last?
We have seen their resilience in bits and spurts on village trips and in the daily sacrifices of life in a ministry family. They will have moments they step up, but they will have moments of struggle. “Everyone will see me cry before this trip is over,” I tell them one morning as we discuss the vulnerability of such a physical task. My daughter’s mouth gaped before she asked, “Do you really think you’ll cry?”
“Of course,” but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. The Lord has carried us through so many hard things. He gave us the grace to come away in the first place, to find a flow of our own.
The years have been marked by trust in Jesus and strung-together days of Doing the Next Thing. We have answered-prayer stories and faith made strong. But for the most part, we’ve stayed in the valley where it feels like, we’ve got this.
When we leave comfort to stand in-the-middle, will our faith meet us there? Will landslide prayers flow in the frigid morning when I step out of my sleeping bag? Will mom-anxiety step behind the wonder of the earth, of my children, of relationships strengthened under high altitude pressure? Will we fall into the van gripping a renewed appreciation for our bodies and the Creator of monstrous, snowy peaks?
We will cry and climb. We will fear and hope. We will pray that something great will be built, fortified by facing suffering together, ready to hold us through life in the valley.
When will we know the bridge has crumbled? When will we know we’ve made it?
Right now.
So good! You have such a stunning way of stringing words and imagery together so beautifully.
WOW- keep climbing- keep going