On Climbing Cardigan – May

Memorial Day, and for the second time in a week, I head up to the mountain I love.

Two years already you’ve been gone.

What have you missed?

Your sister ran a 50K, a 50 Miler, and Boston this year. She and hubby are off to hike the PCT in a couple of days.

Jealous.

Your one brother started college, played some hockey, made future plans.

The other one committed but needs to fix his two wrecked shoulders, poor guy, so there’s that.

Your father has another job, another wife.

Your college class graduated, many of them off to work, missions, or higher degrees.

I hear from them from time to time. They miss you, too.

And your momma?

I’m still here, another year older, drinking too much coffee and not running as much as I’d like.

Two classes of middle school boys have come and gone, and you know what that’s like this time of year: climbing the mountain, singing the hymn, silently weeping a procession of good-bye.

They’re wonderful and wild and make me laugh.

It was a hard fight for contentment, but sometimes, I think, the battle actually looks more like surrender. When we stop wrestling and just hold on, perhaps we give Him room to work. That tricky not my will thing.

I never got a chance to tell you how I used to pray for you while you were down the road at school.

On certain days, I’d feel a pull, that Spirit-nudge, and run the Durham streets, looping tighter to where you slept, blissfully unaware, in your dorm. Around I’d run, prayers pouring from my heart like tears, like blood, as I asked God to pull you, to nudge you, to call you into His destiny and purpose.

He answered in a way I could never have predicted, but I have come to trust His ways. I believe He is using you even in death – because of it, not in spite of it.

So I’ll keep climbing, keep looping, keep surrendering.

Keep looking for you in rock and cloud and sigh.