Seven Miles In
I welcome my daughter as a guest blogger today. She is a freelance graphic artist from Montana. She recently wrote this piece that I think you’ll find very inspiring. Enjoy!
What’s great about a fourteen mile hike is that once you’re halfway in, there’s no giving up, no wrapping up early. Once you’ve reached that seven mile mark, for better or worse, you’re in it.
I’d been hiking with my husband and my parents on a beautiful Montana summer day and within a few miles, we’d experienced every weather pattern available to the area. Clear sky and unrelenting heat, thunderous downpour, frigid wind. We even found ourselves trekking through the remnants of the previous winter’s snow.
Now, about seven miles in, the clouds had split and were scattering in watercolor patterns across the blue sky.
We’d been staring ahead as we went, chatting about everything and nothing, laughing at the mountain goats curiously wandering amongst the tourists and unintentionally scaring a few. We decided to break, and I turned my attention to the wide open valley around me.
The feeling that overwhelms me is…
I might throw up.
My stomach feels tight and I feel tears welling up at the stunning view before me. But it’s not at all how I imagined it would be. You see instagram posts of people going through the same things: laughing, smiling, looking positively profound as they take a selfie with the most enlightened look on their faces. The confrontation of beauty having transformed them into something new. I’m convinced if you had captured my appearance at that moment without me knowing it, I’d have looked nauseous.
I didn’t know how to feel. All of my emotions seemed to merge into one. The view was gorgeous and I was glad we were here. But now I had to confront a storm of emotions duking it out and caught up in the lump in my throat, startled that a person could feel both so small and so significant at the same time.
I was so happy I felt broken.
If I changed a few words around, the above paragraphs would just as precisely have described the time I held my daughter for the first time. I wanted so badly for it to be a picture perfect moment. The sky to have opened up, to have realized I’d never known happiness like this, to be so thrilled and grateful—and I very much felt all of those things.
But with equal parts inadequacy, fear and grief.
In Exodus, Moses asks for God to show him His glory and God simply replies: “no one may see me and live.”
I wonder if that’s what’s happening here.
Our Earthly bodies are not created to be able to take in the full Glory of God. We don’t have the capacity to handle it. But maybe God gives us little glimpses of what it’s like.
“There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” -Exodus 33:21-23
Maybe there’s something especially sacred about those moments.
The ones where you’re confronted with so much beauty you spin out into existential spiral:
Who am I? What’s my goal here? I should really call my mom.
Maybe that’s a taste of what it’s like to “see [his] back.”
Most of us, when we think about Heaven, we think of stunning vistas, a family of believers, seeing God and walking with Him. And all of those things are biblically consistent. But what if we add to that, the joy of having the capacity to take it all in.
To see a rolling valley, chiseled cliffside and rushing waterfalls and have the range, the emotional intelligence to really see the whole thing. To finally say “I get it now.”
In our current state, we are so fragile, so broken, that even the happiest or circumstances can crush us. I spent the first couple of years of my children’s lives teetering between elation and terror. I’d find myself grinning at their beautiful faces, only to be interrupted by my own inability to categorize it.
What if we’re not created to appreciate the joys of life to their fullest within the context of this world.
But one day our capacity will grow with the beauty around us.
“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12
What if, right now, we’re only seven miles in.
Mandi Jean Jackson
