The Hike to the Top

Disregard my last post about not writing until next week. Here I am again :) Okay so this morning I was reading Exodus 19, when Moses is preparing to receive the Ten Commandments. In verse 20, Moses climbs Mount Sinai. He gets to the top, where God tells him to go back down the mountain and warn the people not to break the boundaries, or they will surely die. Here, Moses replies that he has already warned the people. Now, let's think about this. My research today taught me that Moses was about 80 years old at this point. Also, Mount Sinai is a 3 hour hike to the top- it is a stairway of nearly 4,000 steps. So here I am imagining an 80 year old ascending a flight of 4,000 steps, only to get to the top and be told to go back down. Now if I were Moses, I would be like uhm, no way...sorry, God, I'm not doing that again. And I see a little bit of that in his response that he had already done what the Lord told him to do. He was hesitant to obey and hike back down the mountain to perform a task he had already done. But then God told him that he needed to go get Aaron. God doesn't take excuses. So Moses went back down, got Aaron, and trekked all the way back up. So if you think about that, that's 12 hours of hiking in an 80 year old body.

Now this may be completely irrelevant, but I wonder why God had Moses climb that mountain twice? In your life, do you ever feel like you're constantly climbing a mountain? Do you get to what you think is the end, only to be sent back for something you forgot? You have to start back at square one...take each of those 4,000 steps all over again. Sometimes I feel like that. I just wonder why we have to climb the same mountain multiple times. In considering this in the context of my own life, I think that sometimes I have to make the hike over again because I forgot to take in the journey in the first place. I get too focused on the end. I count the number of steps I have left until the top, forgetting to look at everything that's going on around me. I forget to concentrate on the here and now and how it plays into the end, rather than just looking at the end. Each step is a learning process and a chance to discover something...each step is an opportunity for celebration, for relishing the goodness of God and his purpose for me on that step. In this case, the end matters most. But each step on the stairway adds so much meaning to the final result...I'd hate to miss out on that. One of my favorite sayings these days is, "If you don't go to Heaven before you die, then you shouldn't be expecting to go there after." The Pastor of my church-away-from-home says that. It's so true- if you don't experience "Heaven" while you're on the stairway, then you shouldn't be expecting to experience it at the top. And by "Heaven" I don't mean actually going to Heaven. I mean the moments in which your heart is completely at peace. In Desire, John Eldredge describes these moments as, "the times in your life that made you wish for all the world that you had the power to make time stand still. Are they not moments of love, moments of joy? Simple moments of rest and quiet when all seems to be well. Something in your heart says, Finally-it has come. This is what I was made for!" Those are the moments when we get a little taste of Heaven-the moments when your soul is doing what God created it for. Now wouldn't it be a shame if we got so focused on the end, that we forgot to look for these moments along the journey?

Maybe that makes sense, maybe it doesn't. But it was on my heart.
PB&J