“You’re going to Jamaica? That’ll be so nice! Some R&R on the beach!”
“Well, no. I’m going with some people from church.”
“So, a missions trip?”
“Well, we don’t like the word ‘mission’ so much.”
It was a trip with a mission. But not our own. Not one we could ever have named.
We thought maybe we could have an impact on some teenagers from a poor neighborhood in Kingston. Maybe we could show them our faith, maybe we could talk to them about starting churches, or at the very least, loving Jesus. And the best way to have an “impact” on teenagers, stuck in a somewhat poisonous, hard-to-escape environment, circling the vicious cycle of unemployment, teen pregnancy and absent parents? Taking them out of their comfort zone and hiking them up a mountain.
We drive up the side of a mountain, toward the base of the Blue Mountain Peak, the highest point in the longest mountain range in Jamaica, the second highest peak in the Caribbean. Of course we’re late, because Jamaica just runs late, and doesn’t seem to mind too much the panic in our rushed New England eyes. “So, at this rate, we won’t even get up to the camp until midnight? I ate a peanut butter sandwich for lunch at 3. It’s freaking 8 o’clock.” The bitching begins. The two of us sit, isolated, at the front of a bus full of loud teenagers, who don’t seem to understand the fact that we are about to hike up a mountain for four hours and are utterly unprepared. Save your energy, guys. Why won’t you calm down? Why are you still singing Bruno Mars songs? Why won’t you realize how scary, daunting, and NOT ideal this situation is? I close my eyes in frustration and fear and remember words I once read. Jesus told us, “I am the author of your circumstance.” I tell Eric this memory and we both take a deep breath and feel the impact of these words. Gratitude is but a whisper now, but will be our song for the night to come. We get to one of the first bases, Mavis Bank, a coffee-farming community at an elevation of 3000 feet at 8:30PM. We unpack 15 teenagers, 10 Jamaican leaders, and ourselves out of the bus. Bags are distributed, water bottles are filled, boots are strapped tight, flashlights are turned on. Ready for a four-hour hike in the pitch black. Hour four. My eyebrow is swollen from running into a thorn bush. My knees and my knuckles are bloody from a trip over a stump. Four adventurous, hiking American men with $60 boots on their feet and 60 pounds of tents on their back are losing their strength, but not their will. We are finding our way with an instinct and a walkie-talkie, as we lost the group an hour ago. Eric has my pack on his chest, after I’m humbled by the fall and finally surrender after 30 minutes of silencing his push, “Is it about pride, Ashley? Give me the pack.” I’m defeated and I’m angry and I’m losing my breath. The locals in the hill villages tell us, "You're not even halfway." But they told us it would be four hours. They told us we’d connect with the kids. “They” told us a lot of things, as “they” do. The sirens -- who are “they”? -- promise us ease, and we are stuck climbing mountains in the middle of the night. And it’s so easy to blame “them” in this moment. It’s so easy to let the poison in our hearts spit resentment through our teeth, but then the water we drink goes down darker. The nourishment we need is swallowed into a tightened throat, not able to reach our tired blood.
With every step through the dark night, the man beside me becomes more visible. His encouragement and his strength are transparent in the light of my flashlight, in the vulnerability of my fear. His heart for me is beating through both backpacks, and I can smell his every thought. He looks at me with regret after hearing Hour Four is not even halfway. He complains about the sirens, and sighs, “Out of the overflow of the mouth, the heart speaks. I have darkness in my heart.” We stop and pray and confess and confide, and remember our song. You are the author of our circumstance. I will climb this mountain with You. I will climb this mountain with my hands wide open. It is no one’s fault we are here. It is Your design, and we are grateful. We will climb with You, for You. Thank You. It is tattooed on the arm he holds, the password to our Father’s presence. Thank you. We climb. We encourage. We are new. We are healed. We are whole. We are weary, but not weak. We are almost there. The fight for our lives has to be almost over. Right? “Mi brethren, you got 3.5 more miles to go.”
"Fuck this."
Why did I curse Him again? Why are we so quick to forget? No, I can’t keep climbing. No, God. No, friendly Jamaican full of unfriendly news. I will not keep climbing. I will not. How can this be expected of me? It’s not fair. What kind of Author would write this kind of horrendous story? When will the fight be over? I lay back on the chest of the man who keeps saving me, on the tail end of the climb, on the very ends of ourselves. He is defeated and can only lead us closer to God, it’s our only option now. He whispers the words, falling from the tip of his tongue, “Daddy,” and I know I’ll never know a man to love me as much as him. To die to yourself and every comfort you’ve ever known to hold a broken woman in your failing arms and cry this childlike cry, hoping it’ll save us, is the truest taste of the Kingdom I've ever seen. The closest I've ever been to see God's love for me manifest on earth. I can’t find these words now, so I tell him I love him and that our lives will be better intertwined and that I’m certain that I’ve been waiting for him my whole life. We pray and we know, we have to keep climbing. We have to keep climbing these mountains. They’re too tall, and we’re too weak, and we don’t know how to keep going. We have faced all of the obstacles, all of the objection head-on. Many a thorn bush has been thrown in our face. We have sat with members of our community as they tell us our faults and their worries about our relationship. We have made the sacrifices, we let go when all we wanted was to hold on. We wished off the sirens months ago, knowing full-well fighting for this love was neither easy nor fair. But there is an Author. And He wants us to keep climbing. He wants to keep giving us strength. He wants us to be surprised at, really, how much easier it’s been than it should’ve been. And we are surprised to almost run the next 3.5 miles. Singing about the Author’s Promises, the end of this story. Eric screams behind me his revelations. That God loves us, He is fighting for us, and we have to keep pressing on. That our love and our life is this mountain. And we basically run up the rest of the trail, pass our friends, and get to the camp at 6000 feet above sea level at sunrise. We climbed for almost nine hours. And God came through on His promise that we’d make it. He came through on the promise that we’d experience so much of Him in that climb, and so much of each other. We’ve read it in Scripture, but He let our hearts know the truth in being able to do anything in Christ who strengthens us. He broke down my pride and independence, made me rely on another human being in a way that I’ve always dreamed I could, but never really tried. Now, this post is full of “us” where it would be full of “I” and I’m not sure if I’m just talking about Eric & I or if I’m talking to you about an experience we all have as humans on this mountainous earth. His promise was not that being on the top of the mountain would be easy. We slept in too-hot-to-quickly-too-cold tents, we barely ate, we spent most of the time exhausted and unable to fully connect with anyone at all. I forgot God again, I forgot my strength in Him almost immediately. I got tired fast, impatient fast, negative even faster. His promise was not in finishing the climb that the top would be simply glorious. His promise was that He would be there. He will show up in ways we never could’ve dreamed up. We will live the greatest love story ever told, amidst the epic climbs of this life, which come again and again. We get weak, He saves us. We get tired, He saves us. We forget Him, He forgives us. And he gives us more than we’ve imagined; my favorite story I have to tell about how our love is a mountain He will help us climb.
We drive up the side of a mountain, toward the base of the Blue Mountain Peak, the highest point in the longest mountain range in Jamaica, the second highest peak in the Caribbean. Of course we’re late, because Jamaica just runs late, and doesn’t seem to mind too much the panic in our rushed New England eyes. “So, at this rate, we won’t even get up to the camp until midnight? I ate a peanut butter sandwich for lunch at 3. It’s freaking 8 o’clock.” The bitching begins. The two of us sit, isolated, at the front of a bus full of loud teenagers, who don’t seem to understand the fact that we are about to hike up a mountain for four hours and are utterly unprepared. Save your energy, guys. Why won’t you calm down? Why are you still singing Bruno Mars songs? Why won’t you realize how scary, daunting, and NOT ideal this situation is? I close my eyes in frustration and fear and remember words I once read. Jesus told us, “I am the author of your circumstance.” I tell Eric this memory and we both take a deep breath and feel the impact of these words. Gratitude is but a whisper now, but will be our song for the night to come. We get to one of the first bases, Mavis Bank, a coffee-farming community at an elevation of 3000 feet at 8:30PM. We unpack 15 teenagers, 10 Jamaican leaders, and ourselves out of the bus. Bags are distributed, water bottles are filled, boots are strapped tight, flashlights are turned on. Ready for a four-hour hike in the pitch black. Hour four. My eyebrow is swollen from running into a thorn bush. My knees and my knuckles are bloody from a trip over a stump. Four adventurous, hiking American men with $60 boots on their feet and 60 pounds of tents on their back are losing their strength, but not their will. We are finding our way with an instinct and a walkie-talkie, as we lost the group an hour ago. Eric has my pack on his chest, after I’m humbled by the fall and finally surrender after 30 minutes of silencing his push, “Is it about pride, Ashley? Give me the pack.” I’m defeated and I’m angry and I’m losing my breath. The locals in the hill villages tell us, "You're not even halfway." But they told us it would be four hours. They told us we’d connect with the kids. “They” told us a lot of things, as “they” do. The sirens -- who are “they”? -- promise us ease, and we are stuck climbing mountains in the middle of the night. And it’s so easy to blame “them” in this moment. It’s so easy to let the poison in our hearts spit resentment through our teeth, but then the water we drink goes down darker. The nourishment we need is swallowed into a tightened throat, not able to reach our tired blood.
With every step through the dark night, the man beside me becomes more visible. His encouragement and his strength are transparent in the light of my flashlight, in the vulnerability of my fear. His heart for me is beating through both backpacks, and I can smell his every thought. He looks at me with regret after hearing Hour Four is not even halfway. He complains about the sirens, and sighs, “Out of the overflow of the mouth, the heart speaks. I have darkness in my heart.” We stop and pray and confess and confide, and remember our song. You are the author of our circumstance. I will climb this mountain with You. I will climb this mountain with my hands wide open. It is no one’s fault we are here. It is Your design, and we are grateful. We will climb with You, for You. Thank You. It is tattooed on the arm he holds, the password to our Father’s presence. Thank you. We climb. We encourage. We are new. We are healed. We are whole. We are weary, but not weak. We are almost there. The fight for our lives has to be almost over. Right? “Mi brethren, you got 3.5 more miles to go.”
"Fuck this."
Why did I curse Him again? Why are we so quick to forget? No, I can’t keep climbing. No, God. No, friendly Jamaican full of unfriendly news. I will not keep climbing. I will not. How can this be expected of me? It’s not fair. What kind of Author would write this kind of horrendous story? When will the fight be over? I lay back on the chest of the man who keeps saving me, on the tail end of the climb, on the very ends of ourselves. He is defeated and can only lead us closer to God, it’s our only option now. He whispers the words, falling from the tip of his tongue, “Daddy,” and I know I’ll never know a man to love me as much as him. To die to yourself and every comfort you’ve ever known to hold a broken woman in your failing arms and cry this childlike cry, hoping it’ll save us, is the truest taste of the Kingdom I've ever seen. The closest I've ever been to see God's love for me manifest on earth. I can’t find these words now, so I tell him I love him and that our lives will be better intertwined and that I’m certain that I’ve been waiting for him my whole life. We pray and we know, we have to keep climbing. We have to keep climbing these mountains. They’re too tall, and we’re too weak, and we don’t know how to keep going. We have faced all of the obstacles, all of the objection head-on. Many a thorn bush has been thrown in our face. We have sat with members of our community as they tell us our faults and their worries about our relationship. We have made the sacrifices, we let go when all we wanted was to hold on. We wished off the sirens months ago, knowing full-well fighting for this love was neither easy nor fair. But there is an Author. And He wants us to keep climbing. He wants to keep giving us strength. He wants us to be surprised at, really, how much easier it’s been than it should’ve been. And we are surprised to almost run the next 3.5 miles. Singing about the Author’s Promises, the end of this story. Eric screams behind me his revelations. That God loves us, He is fighting for us, and we have to keep pressing on. That our love and our life is this mountain. And we basically run up the rest of the trail, pass our friends, and get to the camp at 6000 feet above sea level at sunrise. We climbed for almost nine hours. And God came through on His promise that we’d make it. He came through on the promise that we’d experience so much of Him in that climb, and so much of each other. We’ve read it in Scripture, but He let our hearts know the truth in being able to do anything in Christ who strengthens us. He broke down my pride and independence, made me rely on another human being in a way that I’ve always dreamed I could, but never really tried. Now, this post is full of “us” where it would be full of “I” and I’m not sure if I’m just talking about Eric & I or if I’m talking to you about an experience we all have as humans on this mountainous earth. His promise was not that being on the top of the mountain would be easy. We slept in too-hot-to-quickly-too-cold tents, we barely ate, we spent most of the time exhausted and unable to fully connect with anyone at all. I forgot God again, I forgot my strength in Him almost immediately. I got tired fast, impatient fast, negative even faster. His promise was not in finishing the climb that the top would be simply glorious. His promise was that He would be there. He will show up in ways we never could’ve dreamed up. We will live the greatest love story ever told, amidst the epic climbs of this life, which come again and again. We get weak, He saves us. We get tired, He saves us. We forget Him, He forgives us. And he gives us more than we’ve imagined; my favorite story I have to tell about how our love is a mountain He will help us climb.
:) Thank you for sharing this with the world Ashley. I really like how raw this story is. Time and Time again I see how much we are able to see the Father's love for us through the trails when we stop focusing on ourselves and circumstances. And instead look onto him. Seeing that those weak moments you experienced were made strong in Him.
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