What?

This may not make any sense to you, but I’m throwing it out there anyway.

This is what I used to think about the Christian journey.

It was the typical “mountain top” and “valley” thing you hear about where the peaks happen at a retreat and last for about two weeks and then its back to the valley again until you have another mountain top experience. For some reason this didn’t sit comfortably with me.

This is what I think about the Christian journey now.

A good friend of mine explained the journey to me like this.

“There are no vallies.” He said. “We are on a constant journey up a mountain and Jesus is climbing the whole way with us. Sometimes we say, ‘I need a rest.’ And Jesus says, ‘Okay, let’s rest.’” The water is constantly rising, however. Eventually, He says, ‘Its time to climb higher. The terrain is going to be difficult.’ If we don’t keep climbing, then the water might get up to our knees and we feel a little sluggish until we continue up the mountain into the more difficult terrain. And then we go through the rest procedure again. Sometimes the water rises to our heads and its at this point that we feel like we are in a “valley”. We’re not, we don’t go backwards. We in a constant forward motion on this journey. We’ve just not followed up the mountain into the more difficult terrain and the water has risen farther than we can take. Jesus is always there, reaching down and helping us climb higher.”

This was beautiful to me. It just didn’t seem to make sense that we would go down. It seems that our journey is always moving forward and down just didn’t seem to be a part of that for me.