I've loved Everest and its mystique ever since the day I learned of it when I was much younger. I watched every TV show and movie on it I could get my hands on. I went onto reading Into thin Air and The Last Climb. Both are excellent books. I'm fascinated by Everest. For a long time, I even wanted to climb it. That's changed over the years though. I truly think I could with enough training but it's so expensive to wage an ascent on it. I've grown way too thrifty for that. Plus I have a wife and she'd kill me if I died trying to climb Everest. Getting to base camp, though, is still on my bucket list.
With us being in the age of the internet, I'm now able to live vicariously thru others. Every year, I follow multiple climbing teams' dispatches from the mountain. I love the near real-time updates. In 2016, I followed the Russel Brice's Himex team and the USX team of American soldiers bringing awareness for soldiers with PTSD. I followed Jeff Evans as he worked with the Life Flight helicopter that rescued climbers who were sick or injured on the mountain and saved many lives. They all provided great storylines to follow over a month or two.
Another storyline that was always interesting to me was Erik Weihenmayer's story. He was the first to climb the mountain blind. That's pretty impressive. He's also climbed the Seven Summits, the tallest mountain on each continent. He's organized a big climb for blind kids in Asia. He started an organization in the US called No Barriers for people with disabilities. He's written books. He's kayaked the down the Grand Canyon. He was on an adventure racing TV show in Morocco called Expedition Impossible where his team (also including Jeff Evans) took second out of the many teams that started the race. The guy has certainly not led a boring life.
Erik wrote an article for Outside Magazine where he talked about one of the biggest things he took away from his climb on Everest. It was something that one of his guides, Pasquale "PV" Scaturro, said to him just after the climb. He basically told Erik to not let Everest be the greatest thing he ever accomplishes in his life. That's a pretty bold statement to be made to a blind guy who just climbed Everest.
After Erik spent a long time pondering that, when they got back to the States, PV eventually elaborated. He basically said that a lot of times, people just coast after climbing Everest. They stop living life. They've got memories, pictures, awards, and they cling to those things never taking another step forward in life.
Many climbers peak on the tallest peak in the world. They become stagnant and slowly die. That's so true figuratively and literally. No one can stay on the summit of Everest forever and live to tell about it. If you try and stay on that peak too long in the Death Zone, you will die. On that summit, you enjoy the moment but you eventually have to start moving off that peak to survive. The consequences of stagnating there are dire. That's the same in life.
How often do we do that in our own lives? And let me take that a step further. As Christians, how often do we do that in our faith?
We stand on the accomplishments of the past and never move forward to find another. We are content to just sit stagnant in our faith. What many don't realize is that a faith that is stagnant soon withers.
In John 14:12, Jesus talks about how those who believe will do the works He did and also do even greater things. You can't do great things standing still clinging to the past. You can only do great things if you get out and move forward.
All to often, we cling to the past in our faith. Maybe it's the reading of your Bible. I already read it once this week. I'll read it the next time I have time or remember. We might go weeks or months without reading it again. Maybe it's going to church. I went on Christmas so I'm good now for a few months, we think. Maybe it's the mission trip you went on years ago. Maybe it's that one time you shared your faith with your friend...10 years ago. We think, I did it once, and that's good enough. I've done my time and now it's someone else's turn. Or maybe it's that I've already done it and maybe I'll do it again but I don't need to now. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that I did it. Soon, the days pass by, then the years, maybe even decades where you've clung to your peak never finding another peak to climb. We eventually stop climbing altogether.
With Everest, it's an extremely dangerous climb. It's dangerous in the ascent but what people don't realize is that it's also dangerous in the descent. It used to be that 1 in 4 climbers who summitted died on the way down. (Those numbers can fluctuate a bit from season to season depending on how many deaths occur.) There are a lot of reasons for that whether it's running out of oxygen or just using all your strength to get to the summit and having literally nothing left to get yourself down. I think a lot of times, when a climber reaches the peak, they have reached a huge accomplishment and think they are done. They haven't anymore cares in the world. In their mind, their dream was never walking back into base camp after the climb. Their dream ended with a summit, and they never dreamed further than that. In reality, a full climb is summitting and returning to the base camp alive. That's finishing strong.
And as Christians, isn't that what we're called to do in our faith, to finish strong? When you're running a race, you just don't stop. On Everest, it is a race. It's a race against time to get yourself up the mountain and down before bad weather moves in or before your body shuts down on you. Basically, it's a race to get up and down before you die. You stop in that race for too long, and you not only lose the race but you lose your life. In our own faith, we have to continue to fight the good fight. We have to make sure we run with endurance and finish strong.
We have to keep drinking of that living water Jesus talked about in John 4:14. The New American Standard Bible puts it this way, "But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life." He didn't say, "Drank." It wasn't a one time thing. He said, "Drinks." We stop drinking it and our faith will whither. One of my biggest fears in life for people is that they will fall into the trap of thinking they are saved when they are not. Just as in Matthew 7 when the people in the story thought they were saved resting on the supposedly great deeds they did for God in the past, Jesus said He never even knew them. Now there's more to the story, obviously, but on the surface, that's a scary thing.
We often see in life that people grow early in their faith journey only to then be choked out by the thorns of this world. Many times, it's because they rest in their past. I prayed the salvation prayer. I did some good things in the past. That's good enough, right? They cling to those things never moving forward in their faith. They stop drinking of the living water that only Jesus can give. Their faith enters the Everest Death Zone, stagnates, and it eventually dies.
In our faith journey, we have to keep moving forward with Jesus. We've got to keep growing. We have to keep climbing. When we finish one peak, we don't cling to that but search out a new peak to climb. We have to remember that summitting is only halfway to finishing the climb. We have to remember to not let our past summits be the greatest thing we ever do in our faith. We have to keep moving forward in our faith. Let's not let our faiths die on the mountain or even in the valleys between climbs. Valleys may seem safer because they provide comfort but comfort and safety are just as dangerous to our faith as being in danger on the mountain. It's that comfort and safety that can draw us into clinging to past memories never stepping foot back on a real mountain. Jesus came that we could live our lives abundantly. Let's live our race, our climb, our life, and our faith with endurance and finish it strong.
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