I Still Got Mountains to Climb (On My Own)

Oh, I'm a wandering soul
I'm still walking the line
That leads me home

Alone, all I know
I still got mountains to climb
On my own, on my own

— "Enough to Let Me Go," Switchfoot



Two words I’ve thought about lately are alone and forgotten.

Alone is something I’ve known my whole life. I’ve always liked to be alone — an adventure in the woods, by myself writing, driving with windows down and music on. Alone was never negative, but rather, an escape. It was what I did when the crush came too close, when the people were annoying, when I needed to recharge.

When alone becomes a dirty word is when someone else decides it for you. You choose to be around people, to try to connect, only to find that even in crowds you’re alone. You’re part of a family or group of friends, except you’re there by default, and you feel that if the teams of life were picked again, you wouldn’t make it. You do everything everyone else does, do it your best, work hard, mimic others, but for some reason they don’t want you. They’ve never wanted you. Your best hope is to be scooped up in some collective “we,” where everyone gets a shot. God loves everyone, so you get included in that one. Your town or club is small enough that they need a statistic, so you’re considered part of them when it comes to counting. Someone is stuck with no one else to talk to, so you get human contact today.

This is where forgotten comes in, and where I must start hedging against self pity and melancholy. These thoughts may sound extreme, but I’m not grasping at straws to support a sob case I’ve put together in my head when I feel lonely. In the rhythms of life, this is my loose wheel. And of course there’s self pity and melancholy. If that drives you off — if you’ve never felt irrevocably alone or if you don’t fear life has forgotten you — then you probably won’t find anything of use here anyway.

Forgotten is when a person carries on an entire conversation with you but you don’t do any talking. Forgotten is making plans with someone and double-checking those plans only to be at the basketball court, alone, having rushed through your dinner to be on time and now standing and wondering whether to call and chase once again. Forgotten is never being thought of for jobs or roles you know you’re good at, or that you’ve lobbied for, or that you’ve put in the time for — and wondering whether your trying was what disqualified you in their minds, because they probably got overwhelmed by you just by you going for it. Forgotten is living in your hometown for days, weeks, months, now years, and fighting a chronic illness, and people not bothering to say hello or check in.

I rarely tell people how I’m actually feeling. Some ask, but I suspect they don’t really want to know. They are polite; that is nice, but they don’t really want to know I crapped my pants this morning. They probably care about other humans; that is admirable, but they don’t know what to do when I tell them all my symptoms, all my attempted remedies, and the fact that yet another doctor has found me healthy but in constant pain. I joke and tell them about funny things I have to do, such as drink charcoal or take pills that contain ox bile. I say I’m feeling better, and yes, I have lost weight! I tell them I’m OK and wave the conversation on to something else. I’m no more intrigued by being sick than they would be.

But humans, and life, want extremes and definition. You either do something or you don’t. You are something or you’re not. There’s not much patience for the in-between, which is where we all get such struggles with things like failure, slow progress, or suffering. You’re either sick or you’re not. If you are sick, you’re trying to get better. “Are you feeling any better?” “No, sorry.” (Why am I apologizing?) “But I’m praying for you.” [Silence.] (Gosh, I’m sorry, I guess I’ve let you down by not making your prayers work?) We excel at raising money and rallying friends when disaster strikes, and celebrating when big hurdles are passed. But what of the great in-between? Or what about the never get better? Does the wife and mother whose husband was paralyzed and still struggles to remember perhaps still need meals delivered? Does the parent whose child killed himself still need a friend, every week, just to be with? Does the man who lost his dream job ever get over it?

Forgotten. Forgotten is when someone else decides when you’re alone. Rather than the beauty and solace of rest and waiting — those things that come when you march out alone — you’re instead sitting in a puddle with your legs broken, needing help, and it’s not there. Others mill around you. Some promised to come. But only a few are looking, and the ones who do look wonder why you don’t get up. Isn’t it time to move on? Shouldn’t you be working? The reason you don’t get anywhere is because you’re not.... “I can’t be bothered by someone who’s not going to do their part.”

I visited with some friends recently who are riding the waves of life, one of them taking some hard tumbles. We talked about her struggle, and what she’s doing right now to get back on her feet. I was reminded again that we all have struggles, of so many stripes and colors, and that we’re all dealing with brokenness and pain in our own ways. Hers was pretty tough, and she’s just hanging on for now until she breaks through the fog. I tried to encourage her, and then, in a moment alone before I went to see her again, the words passed through my mind: “God has not forgotten you.”

That’s what it is, right? That’s what we want to know. Job sat in a pile of ashes and scraped his boils with broken pottery and cried out to God. Elijah went on a rant of self-pity after seeing great miracles. David wrote poetry from a cave. The people of Israel hung up their harps. They wanted to know where God was, and whether He had forgotten them.

We know the theology — what it says of God and us. We know what we think we “should” believe. But in those puddles with our broken legs, the words of the doubters join with our deepest fears and do terrible math. Our pain multiplies as we tell ourselves we should be better, and we should be able to get ourselves up, and how dare we feel any sadness for the situation in which we’ve ended up. We have to prove ourselves and find our way back. We tell ourselves we deserve to be forgotten.

The bastardization of the Gospel in human hands has created a world in which we must in some way work our way to God. This Gospel is not limited to a moment of salvation, either — it extends into the way we approach our attempts to walk with God, our justification of judging those around us, and our addiction to always seeing if we are progressing and adding up. When we suddenly fall out of the hamster wheel and have to face ourselves and our malfunctioning attempts at life, we don’t just face the pain of failure and loss. We also face the deep mark of despair that in all of this, we might have lost God, and if we haven’t misplaced Him, then surely He has forgotten us. We judge ourselves according to these false standards we have created and fear that we have come up wanting, and we project that fear back onto God and say He’d have nothing to do with us.

What I found most interesting about seeing my friends deal with their struggles is how easy it was to forget mine. There’s no better gift in life than to be able to carry someone else’s pain, and in some way help them with it, which is why perhaps suffering that secludes you from other people is so doubly terrible — you are sifting through your own crap, and you are cut off from taking your eyes off yourself and helping others. But there’s also a way that looking at others can quickly clarify your own situation. When I looked at my friends, knowing their long history of loving God and life and people, and seeing how well they shined even in this, I quickly remembered all of God’s promises and imagined all He could do. I could say with assurance, “God has not forgotten you.” Where suffering creates a berth for the moronic to kick those who have fallen down, it also makes way for a handhold for the faithful to pull along their friends whose feet are slipping. I had no doubts that God would not forget them, and that He would carry them through, and I began to find it silly that I couldn’t believe the same would happen for me.

For all the verses we tout as Christians as essential, I’ve found that Romans 5:8 takes care of most situations: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

While we were making mistakes — willfully and rebelliously — Christ died for us. While we were failing to bounce back quickly, Christ died for us. While we weren’t working hard enough, Christ died for us. While we were pushing Him away, Christ died for us. While we were in muddy puddles with broken legs, Christ died for us. He did not forget us, walk around us, speak down to us. He was separated from God so we would never have to be. He was forsaken by God so God would not forsake us. He gladly carried our pain so we could know the joy of carrying others’ pain. He is the friend who stands outside the situation and looks at us, knowing us as complete and thinking the best of us, and shakes His head and says, “God has not forgotten you.”

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while (not actually this one, but one based on the phrase I used for the title). I’ve started it a few different times, only to fizzle out on long digressions about mountains and what they symbolize and why it’s important. (There as so many metaphors you can take from mountains, crappy or not.) I’ve imagined dumping my guts out and explaining just how terrible things can be, and how no one really understands, and how I push people away so I can climb the mountains on my own.

Yes, some of it is true — that no one on this earth really knows what this feels like, and I must carry those burdens alone. Yes, some of the weight in my heart is justified — that it’s terribly frustrating to be around people who chirp about this or that when I desperately need a hand. Yes, it’s a solitary pursuit that no one can really help me with, and yes, it’s about dying to myself, and the transformation that happens through pain.

But I’ve never climbed a mountain alone. God has not forgotten me, and especially not when I was hiking, which despite its exhilarating exterior (words I will never say: “The view was totally worth it!”) is the most painful, albeit healthy, activity I can do. For each mountain, God has been there. He was there when I climbed Rooster Comb and wasn’t sure I’d make it up, much less down, because of shooting pain in my hip and back. I had the words of Jon Foreman’s “House of God Forever” stuck in my head as I put foot in front of foot, and I knew I’d have to find a flat place where I could lay down and stretch out my back and legs, or else I’d be crawling down on my stomach. As I recited words about quiet streams, all of the sudden I heard one, and I smiled, because it matched the song. And then I stopped and almost cried, because the quiet stream that comes down Rooster Comb Mountain has some big old rocks in the middle that have been flattened over time. Flattened enough that I could lay down on them and stretch my back and legs. And then get up. And hike the rest of the mountain, all the way to the top, and all the way back down.

There was the adrenaline of Blueberry, on that day I charged into the wilderness with the fury of a man running full-speed at a bear with a pocket knife in the hopes that the fight could kill off his problems once and for all. My feet could barely get me up that hill, the trees sticking out at far less than right angles from the steep, muddy trail. But God was there, too, when I sat in the wild mountain grass at the top and realized I’d left my demons down at some turn and been given peace instead.

You fight through the rain and crawl over slippery rocks, braving the spider webs that span the trails for the moment when you get to the top and look out at the valley. It’s wet underneath you, and the clouds are gray and heavy above. But something has broken past the gloom and lit up the ground below. It may be storms all around, but the sun has come through.

God shows up in all these little ways. We’re tempted not to find joy in these small things, or to write them off as mere pleasantries in our day. But that’s not all they are. The moon is not just beautiful when it shines over the dark lake. The rainbow is not just colors in the sky. The animals all around us are not just stray parts. They’re all telling us, at those perfect moments and needed times: God has not forgotten you.

I don’t know the answer of what you do when people forget you, and when you feel alone in the worst of ways. I don’t know what happens when you have mountains to climb all on your own. I don’t know whether it’s a good idea to start a blog when your brain is mush and you can’t follow a self-made prompt as basic as: “Mountains to climb. On your own.”

I go hiking alone — I take care of my biggest problems and deepest fears alone — because I see no way I could take anyone with me. Some things you just have to do alone, and some things others can't help you with, no matter how much you want it. But I also go alone because alone is a choice. In a world where I can’t keep up and I can’t really blame anyone for forgetting me, alone is when I choose to accept my limitations and do something with them. Alone is where I embrace the alienation that has always been there and revel in the fact that when I was lost in the woods, alone and in peril, Christ died for me. And every time I hike, He is there again, in some way. A tiny speck on top of a giant mountain, looking down at everything you left behind or that has left you behind. You are not alone. God has not forgotten you.

We climb mountains so that we know, in ways we couldn’t without the fight, that God has not forgotten us.

And yes, that’s a metaphor.

Coming in Hot

The hyping up I do to try to pretend it's all in my head and to try to just out-muscle it, only to be beaten back by my body.

The mornings I get out of bed, determined to conquer the day, and just fall down.

There's only so many days you can just give up and go rest at the beach, right?

The things I do to fight it. The way I tell myself it's important not to admit that I just can't work past it. How I try to "do my part" and push back at it.

I've been coming to accept that maybe I am sick. Maybe my body does control me. Maybe I'm not getting better.

I've had the total body pain and sensitivity since I was a child, the intense knee pain since junior high, the hip and back soreness since college, the eye oozing and constant need to pee since 2010, the wrist/arm/hands weakness and pain and lack of function since 2011, the stomach problems since 2012, the overwhelming fatigue and muscle pain and emotional overload and brain fog since 2013, and the apathy and weakness ever since I came home and gave up the stuff that is "bad for me" but made me feel normal to try to be healthy. Maybe there is something wrong with me, and it's not aches and pains, and it can't be fixed by me being told to "exercise more," and I can't out-will it.

But maybe I can?

I've lived a life of compromise and just getting along for so long with this pain and illness that I'm afraid I'll forget how to live otherwise. I'm sick of being mediocre. This constant need to do only what is necessary, to live within limitations, is a foreign world to me still, and I blame it for my shortcomings.

But then, I was digging through some of my things the other night, and I began to wonder. I wrote hundreds of songs, both words and music. Were any of them any good? Hundreds of poems. Articles. Stories. Novels. A book. Thousands of photographs. Graphic design. Newspaper pages. Magazines. Have I always been mediocre? The way I play sports scares me, because I don't do anything the textbook way — it's all adapted to fit me and my weird pains and body parts. Or I taught myself a different way just because I wanted to, because for some reason I thought I didn't have to do it like everyone else. Is that how I handle everything in life? Am I some diva who's always tried to get by on talent instead of putting in the time to do it right? Is all I have left shells of what could have been, with no hope to resurrect them or continue now that I'm weak, and since I never took the time to build the bases I should have?

I stopped being afraid to really try around the same time I lost the ability to try.

I see it in sports, when the ball is coming at me hot, and I know everything I should do in my brain, and I'm screaming at my body to get down, get down, get the ball, and my body just stays up, not letting me get anywhere near where the ball could hurt me. Is this from day after day of running into walls and coffee tables or getting bruises from someone barely touching me? Has my body decided it can't take anything else that will hurt it and throb for days and days? Has it overridden my will, my fight? The ball is coming in, and I'm a coward. Was I always a coward? I have all these valid health excuses why I might not make the plays as well as others, but I still want to stop the ball. I want to do what I know I can do. I want to help my team. I want to add some value to life. I'm no longer the punk kid making excuses why she can't do things the way everyone is supposed to. I want to do what I'm supposed to, yet now I legitimately can't. Did I bring this upon myself by being that punk? Can a coward never be retrained?

Our identities should not be based on what we can do, but I still wonder. If I can't dribble well anymore, am I still a point guard? I have the talent, locked away, more locks being added against my will. If I can't take grounders, should I still be playing second base? My shortcuts, lacking raw talent, make me unreliable. If all I've ever written are simple songs, why pick up the guitar? I can't put in the time to get better. If I don't write, am I a writer? It's all in my head, waiting, but stuff stuck in people's heads never changed the world. If I can't do anything but eat, sleep, and exercise, why am I alive?

The answers lie in Jesus, and His Father, and the way they value life as life. But I don't understand it. No matter how many times I've rinsed the questions, how many times I've gotten revelations that seem to completely change the picture, this remains a chief question. I have a feeling I'm asking the wrong questions, but that doesn't get me closer to asking the right ones. What does God love so much about broken toys that seem like they'll never be fixed?

I'm not despondent; I have firm beliefs as to why I am still alive and that I shall remain so until God chooses otherwise. But in this place where the body parts fail one by one, healing does not appear to be right around the corner, and no amount of will or positive energy has seemed to make a difference, I am wondering not so much what my new reality is — I have grown used to it in recent months — but rather how I am supposed to approach it. Do you still dream? Do you still run out to second base? Do you still try to play pickup basketball against people you know are going to destroy you? Do you still pull out the guitar? Do you still sing songs in a strange land? If the key to this, as it is with everything, is to draw closer to God and to love Him for just Himself, what then is preferable, the seeker or the white flag? And how are you supposed to find the right questions, or find Him, when your brain is a brick?

The ball is coming in hot. I can see it. My encyclopedia of a mind knows everything about it. What kind of pitch hit what kind of swing, lending itself to what side of the field. I know why Derek Jeter consistently hit to that side, as opposed to the few times Mark Teixeira does (right-handed). I know who plays second base on dozens of major league teams, and who played before them, and before them. I know batting averages and Babe Ruth, home runs and Honus Wagner, left field and Larry Lucchino. But I don't know why my body won't get down and stop that ball. Why I'm mediocre. What being mediocre has to do with anything, including my character and identity. Why things as simple as softball are suddenly referendums on my life and purpose. Whether all that information in my head was a waste of time, or perhaps the cause of my current problems. Why nothing seems to work anymore, and I can't even care enough to check what I've done, to make sure it's clear, to try to get some good out of the rubble.

How to restart the engine. How to understand that an inability to function might be the whole point of the plan. How to fix something that is definitely broken but perhaps is not meant to be fixed.

The ball is coming in hot. Am I just supposed to go to the beach?

On Suffering

I've been dealing with some illness and pain for a while now. I don't generally tell people this or talk about it a lot unless they're good friends who really care, or unless they're annoying people who ask me why I'm not working or what I'm doing with my life. (Honesty!) The extremes, I suppose. It's trickled out enough now that plenty of people know, even if they don't know the extent. The others who don’t know — many of them good friends — would be sympathetic, I’m sure, but there’s just that part of me that hasn’t figured out how to tell them, or why.

I don't know completely why I don't talk about it tons, but I have ideas — I don't want to be a complainer, I don't want it to be the only thing I talk about even if it's the only thing I have to talk about, I don't want it to rule my life, I don't want undue attention when it's really my issue to handle, plenty of other people have (bigger) problems, I'm not sure people will understand, I don't want to be told how I'm supposed to deal with it, I'm easily tired by people asking if I'm better yet or if I've improved (no and no, and you have no idea), I'm afraid people just won't care, etc. I think the biggest reason is because, for a very long time, I thought I just had aches and pains like everyone else, and even when I knew it was more, I thought it would be gone soon enough, or I'd work through it. I don't have a terminal disease; ergo, get some bootstraps, and pull yourself up by them.

It's been going on for some time, though, and the tougher days are when I realize it's becoming my new reality not only in my body but also in my mind. I'm not going to wake up OK tomorrow. The next doctor's visit is not going to have the magic cure. This, and all its limitations and loss, could be my life.

Like any good American, go-getter, overachiever, or modern Christian, I made a plan and attacked the things that were keeping me down. I watched my friends lose weight on Facebook, and I treated sickness the same way, setting goals and coaching myself along. I've been reading Stuart Scott's Every Day I Fight, looking to glean some lessons from him punching cancer in the gut without quit. I've preached to myself about the power of positive thinking, of getting my head screwed on straight and choosing to overcome.

But there's a reason things like this are so hard to deal with — it's because they're hard. If they could be conquered just by some positive thinking or repeating a truth back to yourself, they wouldn't be the kind of things that change people's lives, that leave them in a funk for years or maybe change them forever. Pain, illness, and any form of suffering hurt. They attack, and the reason they hurt so much is because that's what they're geared to do. They control you in a way that makes you befuddled why they’re not gone, and why you couldn't take them down like any other problem. It's called suffering not because of the initial pain, discomfort, or displacement, but because of the prolonged siege it does on your soul. Something that anyone would look at from the outside — that you once looked at from the outside — and judge as a problem (but a problem that could be addressed with something akin to a 30-day weight loss program) has instead climbed deep into your heart and robbed you of things you're afraid you'll never get back. And you don't know what it means.

When I look back through the years I’ve been dealing with different forms of physical pain, it’s never the actual pain or limitations that really get me. The hardest part, by far, has been in the mind and the soul. I was shy for years about saying that I suffered, because I think that term should be reserved for heavy-duty pain. But now I accept it as a word that covers a lot of issues, and I think that we all suffer more than we admit. I think we all follow the path I did in some way — the denial, the attempt to be better, the hiding of our pain and faults, thinking we can get past them.

I unfortunately am not here to tell any sufferers how to get past their pain. But I do want to share some thoughts in the hope that one or two may be a lifeline similar to the ones I have grabbed at different times. This living study of suffering we all do is part of the larger relational aspect of life, and despite my years of waffling and staying silent, I’d be remiss not to share now, knowing that we all indeed do suffer and can go anywhere not by our bootstraps but by lifting each other up.

Waiting on Zion

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

— Psalm 137:1-4


The best kind of hope, and waiting, is the kind that comes in so hard you have to catch your breath, because it’s at once exactly what you needed, yet you didn’t know how much you were waiting for it until it was there in a rush.

I’m waiting for that ultimate fulfillment of hope and waiting, and because I’ve seen it before, I won’t settle for less. I’ve experienced it only in small doses — the nights when the puzzle pieces link together to make wisdom in my head, the days when an opportunity drops from the sky, the times a clear path opens before me where only thistles lived before. Or those moments when I remember I’ve been wanting to call a friend, and I have a minute, and I call, and I suddenly remember what it’s like to be talking to someone who understands you completely, who thinks the best of you completely, who laughs with you completely. In it comes, that rush, and you feel silly for all the times you pushed it off, thinking life couldn’t be beautiful.

People want to know why I haven’t been writing, or when I’ll write again. I don’t write for the same reasons the Israelites hung up their harps.

But then there’s hope, and faith. Faith is believing things can be different. Faith is believing that no matter how many times something has turned out one way, you will get up the next morning looking for it to change. Faith is choosing to live even when life seems to have no purpose, praying for rain when the only clouds are the ones in your heart.

I’m not sure I have anything to say, or whether there are words to describe the thoughts I think are worth passing on. But I know the best way to keep hope alive is to share it — to recite the promises you’ve seen come true, to call the friend who reminds you that the God you have loved and love is not far off, to sing the songs through tears in a strange land.

Romans 5:5 says we shouldn't be ashamed to hope because we have God's love.

So I’ll write to remember God’s love, my only hope. Perhaps it will expedite the rush for all others who are marooned, wandering, stuck, broken, or just waiting.

Perhaps it will bring my rain.