Mountains

It's summer camp season, so my social media feed is filled with pictures of young persons hanging out with their friends, worshiping God, and having mountaintop experiences. There are updates about how many lives are being saved, how many commitments are being made, how many core memories are being locked in. 

It reminds me of my own camp seasons more than two decades ago. 

And lest the rest of us be left out, there's something for the adults, too. Spiritual retreats, ladies' weekends, mens' breakfasts, church picnics, worship night under the stars...the lists go on. Summer is a great season; it reminds us of the mountains that we've been on. 

These are the moments we want to recreate. These are the moments we want to experience forever. If we're honest, most of our church programming is tailored to try to create these experiences - mountaintops. Moments of such vibrant, worshipful, joyous encounter with God that your whole life feels full. You might even say overflowing. 

You come bouncing out of these moments with all kinds of energy, all kinds of hope, all kinds of confident assurance. All kinds of enthusiasm, not just for your own walk with the Lord, but for everybody's. You're about to tell the world how incredible God is, and you've got enough pep and zip and woohoo in your spirit and your voice that you just know they're gonna listen. 

How could they not? 

Yes, we want to live our lives on the mountaintops. 

In fact, most of us come home from these experiences - from these camps, these retreats, these picnics, these fellowships - and determine that we're never going to live in the valleys again. We're never going to let ourselves lose this feeling. We're never going to settle for anything less in our life of faith than exactly this - the full-throttle, completely-sold-out, total excitement for God that we have after a few days away with Him. 

But we know it doesn't last. 

We go back to our real life - to work and family and neighbors and bills and responsibilities and bodies and brokenness. And it doesn't take long until that high that we felt wears off and settles back into the doldrums, back into the routine, back into checking a box on a connect card and dropping it in the box on our way to beat the (fill in the rival denomination of your choice) to Wendy's. 

Before long, we're wondering how we can get it back. How we can get that feeling back. How we can recreate that mountaintop experience and discover that fellowship all over again. How we can refill our tank, which feels far more empty these days than that fullness of overflowing we said we were never going to let go. 

We wonder if we've lost our faith. If maybe we don't believe any more like we used it. It certainly doesn't feel like it used to. 

And then...the bottom falls out....