Praying God's Wisdom: When Life gives you a False Summit

 

From the ends of the earth, I cry to you for help when my heart is overwhelmed. Lead me to the towering rock of safety, for you are my safe refuge, a fortress where my enemies cannot reach me. [Psa 61:2-3 NLT]

 My husband is a hiker. He goes out into the mountains, usually into the back country where there are few trails and fewer people, and he explores. He loves finding new vistas, beautiful places to camp, quiet coves where he can sit and think. In the hiking world, there’s a concept called a “false summit.” As you’re going along on the trail, you can see the top ahead of you. You keep climbing and climbing, your legs getting weary and the weight of your pack seeming to multiply with each mile, but you can see the end and you’re almost there! But then, just as you approach the goal, you find that it was not, indeed, the top. It was merely an outcropping in the path and you’ve still got quite a ways to go. You’ve been pacing yourself for this summit, and now you don’t know how you’ll continue on. Indeed, I bet a fair number of people turn around at this point, not completing the goal of the hike.

 Have you ever told yourself, “If I can just make it until XXXX, then I’ll be ok,” or, “Once I get past this hurdle, things will be manageable”? The challenge comes in when you get to that place, the place at which you thought things would get better, easier, and then something new comes along, as it inevitably does. Last year, I spent the first four months, plus a few from the year before that, planning a major, bucket-list, family trip. I kept thinking, once we get to the other side of this, then I can rest, then things will go back to normal. I even intentionally planned three months of rest on the other side of the trip to recuperate. Then what happened? The week after we returned my husband was laid off from his job of more than 27 years! The chaos and overwhelm leading up to the trip didn’t come close to comparing to that which followed it. It was my false summit, the point at which I thought things would get easier and it would all be “downhill” from there, and instead I found that I needed to muster up extra energy to keep going, just when I had thought I was finished and had spent it all getting to that point.

 This all is what comes to mind when I hear, “I cry to you for help when my heart is overwhelmed.” And what does the Psalmist say next? “Lead me to the towering rock of safety, for you are my safe refuge, a fortress where my enemies cannot reach me.” He doesn’t ask God to take away his troubles. He doesn’t strike out on his own path, sure that he can figure it out on his own. No, he asks God to lead him. I don’t know about you, but when I seek and rely on God, I always seem to have enough. Enough energy to complete the task, enough money to pay the bill, enough gas to get where I’m going, enough. When God leads, He also provides. Seeing that false summit of the end of my trip, I had literally poured every ounce of everything I had into it. I was spent in every way possible. Truly, I was beyond spent, I had far exceeded my limits and was deeply in physical and emotional debt. When this new curveball of a layoff came our way, I didn’t think I had anything left in me to face it. But God. We sought Him and He led us. He showed us a better way. He sustained us in the waiting. He taught us new things and blessed us abundantly in so many ways. We are truly in a better position financially, emotionally, relationally, all of it than we were when we began this season. And no, I didn’t set a new target for, “When my husband gets a new job, then I’ll be fine.” Not gonna lie, it was pretty tempting, but I feel like the summit is so far past that, that it is merely a milestone along our path.

Here’s the Thing: It’s natural for people to set goals, to visualize endpoints, to work towards their perceived summit. Sometimes we do have to throw everything we’ve got into getting there or we’d never make it. But if you get to that goal and find that it was, indeed, a false summit, and you have to push on even farther with less resources, let God lead you. He’ll show you the best path, the one with ripe salmonberries along the way to sustain you.