Photo by Venezuelan Tourism.
After college I had the incredible opportunity to serve a parachurch organization called Chi Alpha for a little over a decade. That time was foundational and monumental for me. It is permanently fixed in my soul as a vital season I will always treasure for the special memories made, the friendships developed, and the growing taking place within my own heart and mind.
One of my fondest memories came at the very end of my time with the organization. For months we had planned a trip to Venezuela to work at an orphanage in the remote countryside. It was an exhilarating adventure full of many special moments with dear friends.
On the last day of our adventure we took a gondola up into the mountains near Caracas. A gondola is basically a small cage for people suspended on a cable that is then carried slowly up the side of a mountain. Just think of a big aquarium dangling from a wire going up the side of a mountain and you have the right idea.
We waited at least an hour for our turn to step into a cage. As we waited I listened to a group of local girls argue about whether my friend Rob was Justin Bieber. I don’t think Rob knew he was the topic of conversation at all, but it didn’t stop the boys accompanying the young ladies from shooting him ugly looks.
I had ridden a ski lift many times, dozens of times, but I wasn’t altogether prepared for the adventure about to ensue as my friends Jake, Ellen, and Rashad stepped into the gondola ahead of me. We all settled in for what was supposed to be an almost twenty-minute ride to the top of the mountain. Rashad was clearly very nervous about the experience while the rest of us were good to go.
As our tiny cage crept up the side of the hill some things began to change. Visibility plummeted even as our altitude rose. The temperature within the small suspended glass box decreased as well. And then, as a white wall loomed ahead of us, my friend’s nervousness escalated into full-blown panic.
We passed out of visibility and into an alien world of white fog, the gondola ascending into the clouds themselves on the side of a remote Venezuelan mountain. It was eerie to be sure. Rashad was scared, but what happened next was both beautiful and hilarious. At the top of his lungs my large friend began to not just sing, but bellow in a deep baritone, the lyrics to the timeless hymnal Amazing Grace.
Remember that picture of an aquarium from earlier? Yeah. Bring that back and add a large man singing boisterously enough for cages on either side to hear. It was awesome! It didn’t take long for him to calm down after that. Which I think all of us in the car appreciated since we were maybe halfway up the mountain.
I don’t think the beauty of the moment was lost on any of us that afternoon. We had spent a week working with kids in an impoverished place. We had helped clean up a school and made playgrounds playable again. The evenings were spent serving a faraway church that shared a common faith. So, Rashad’s instincts weren’t to allow his panic and anxiety to carry him into a dangerous reaction suspended high above the mountain valley. His reaction was to lean into grace, and his demonstration was to literally voice his feelings in song.
There have been many times when my life has found me suspended above the valleys of failure and dangling within the fog of uncertainty. Sometimes nerves get the best of me. It’s not a thing I think anyone has perfected. I am continuing to learn just how little I should fear what lies within the fog, because I have great faith in the one who makes the fog.
I’ve known about Jesus all my life. I am after all a church kid. But I started living my faith on my own—as real as I knew how, in my teenage years. I’ve lived a life wrapped in stories of my forefathers and grandparents, my uncles, and friends—many of them also followers of faith in Jesus.
Perhaps what I see the most about those who follow authentic faith is their lives are not free of hard things. They don’t get out unscarred or without having to face down fear. They don’t make it out at all. None of us really do. I know, that doesn’t sound like the most encouraging thing a guy could say when he is trying to make a point about faith. But here’s the bottom line: those of us who don’t just dabble in faith, but go all in, will consistently find ourselves in places and situations that feel like a group of friends dangling on the side of a mountain.
The thing about this life is no one gets out alive. We all have choices to make. We can fear the fog. We can let doubt keep us from stepping into the gondola when it’s our turn and forever miss the journey ahead. We can wait at the bottom and never see the beauty waiting just above. Or we can step into a journey of mystery and uncertainty.
I want to keep stepping on the gondola. I want to keep letting life carry me up and into the fog. I might not know exactly where I’m going, but I do know exactly where I’m heading.
After several more minutes of a grinding pace that s-l-o-w-l-y carried us up the precipice we broke through the clouds. There, on the other side we were met with a festival you could not have seen or even imagined from the ground below. We stepped out of our cage into a party.
There were jugglers and vendors, markets and handmade things. There were singers, dancers, performers, and artisans. Delectable treats and sweet things hung from stalls lining the cobblestone paved walkways. Happy people walked shoulder-to-shoulder stranger with stranger and no one stopped to argue about politics, sports, or other trite things.
The sights of people in celebration were spectacular, but when you looked past the wondrous scene of joy unbridled there was something even more spectacular to behold—the view.
Stunning vistas the like of which I had never witnessed met my gaze. No small feat for nature to throw the way of a kid raised in mountains who spent most of his free time around mountains and on mountains doing mountain things. I watched what must have been kids playing on a nearby range. I saw an airplane fly by—below us. I saw miles of mountains, farms, roads, and villages. It was spectacular.
It was, to say the least, monumental in scale and beauty. I could see for miles. The horizon seems further away so far up. As if ascending to such a majestic place somehow offered a perspective not to be found elsewhere.
And really that’s the way of it. Faith does lend perspective. Before and behind. Below and beside. Faith gives you a glimpse into what you can’t see. Faith doesn’t even help you see it all the time either. It just helps you come to terms with what can’t be seen.
The trouble is we sometimes forget our own faith. We forget what happened yesterday that gave us the boldness to believe in the first place. We forget the wins we’ve seen and the losses we’ve been carried through.
Forgetfulness can do a real number on faith. It can make the fog seem thicker and the cage seem smaller. No one forgets on purpose. We just displace the memories of all the spectacular things we’ve seen with new stuff. Often boring stuff. We fill our minds with spreadsheets and P&L statements, with PTO meetings, soccer practices, and deadlines. We jam it full of Facebook, Snapchat, and cable news. We keep on cramming until we don’t even remember we have forgotten something sacred to us. In our scramble to fill our lives with meaning we move some of our most meaningful moments toward the fringe—losing them to the fog of forgetfulness in the process.
All of this leaves us with the appearance of meaning, and belonging, and purpose—but at the cost of our souls. We raise up a wondrous facade. Like a shrine built to our own importance and interests. But that can never last.
When the fog looms and the cage squeezes I am the last guy I can depend on. I’m probably too busy freaking out. Especially if I am too busy being important to remember what’s important. The cure or fix or just plain better way of doing life is to remember. Remember what amazing thing God has done in your life and remember how it changed you forever.