Traveling Mercies

It starts one fall evening on the swing in the backyard. A conversation about a trip. He wants to camp. You agree. So the planning begins, anticipation grows, and then finally, one Friday evening in the August heat of summer, you leave home with gear, some food, a full tank of gas, and a heart full of hope and excitement. You love taking trips.

Seventeen hours later, you arrive at your destination two states away from home and far from any worries you chose to leave there. The air is different and you like that. There are few conveniences, and a book helps you decide that is okay. You have to work to get water, but not as hard as people half a world away. Your needs change, along with your perspective. It is worth it.

You climb a mountain with labored breath and aching legs. You stretch your arms to Heaven, and a little later you fall down the mountain. And through the dirt, rocks, blood, and sweat, you laugh because you are thankful you only fell down and not off the mountain. You decide it really is all about perspective.

You climb another mountain and argue with your husband about his perceived inability to take a decent picture. You are both tired and you decide to abandon the argument and realize there was a time when you would have pursued it, or at least made him suffer a vicious silence. Things have changed and so have you. You decide once again, it is all about perspective.

You begin to smell the forest, and then you begin to smell like the forest. Grooming is something you learn is a luxury. In the course of a week, you become a little more weathered and a little more vulnerable. And you decide life is just funny that way. And you are thankful for change.

Eventually you have to leave and you are a little melancholy. You will miss the way life becomes so simple when surviving becomes a little harder. You decide this realization will be a priceless souvenier.

You drive first both coming and going. You like the light of a day becoming the past. You have a full tank of gas, and a destination, but you let it be about the journey. Your husband rests and his breathing is that of dreamfilled sleep. You take sermons on this journey and at 1:00 a.m., a friend tells the story of Jacob wrestling with God. Maybe it is the hour, maybe it is the message, maybe it is a conversation you are meant to have with the God you share with a stubborn Jacob, but you are taken back to another mountain several years ago. You always refer to it as "that time I sat under that tree." But you remember with fondness that time you wrestled God. You knew He had taken hold of you long before that, but this was the day you truly took ahold of Him. You had questions and bold statements and you were never the same after that day. And the reward was great. That day, He spoke to you a new name and sometimes it sounds different, but always you know its origin.

You don't understand until that moment in the car, in the inbetween hours, in the desert, with the road rising up to meet you and many miles to go, the consequences of that day. And you feel tears build. And maybe you are tired, but you are also thankful. For long roads. For time to think. For trees growing on mountains and the opportunity to sit under them. And the weight of the world becoming a little lighter when you chose that day to hold on a little tighter.