Anyone who knows me on a day-to-day schedule knows that I, for whatever reason, am totally a morning person. I just love ‘em. During the semester, I wake up two hours before classes start and, even so, can still feel like I do not get enough time to enjoy the precious morning hours. I am able to find so much joy in sitting and getting to spend peace inducing, rest bringing, mind refreshing minutes with the sunrise, a cup of coffee, and some QT. Nothing gets me quite as excited about the day as do those wee hours that not many of us get to enjoy.

Unless those wee morning hours are starting at 3:00 am, in which case my stoked level goes way down. Way way down.

Well, to my dismay, I confirmed this morning that I still dislike mornings that start that early. Not exactly the thing I like to lose my Saturday morning sleep-in in order to find out. Why do we always gotta take a good thing and mess it up.

This early wake up call in particular did actually have purpose (luckily). I describe so dramatically how it was the worst thing ever, but the people I got to spend it with made it worth every lost second of snoozing. A group of friends and myself piled into the sweet, sweet 4WD Forerunner, named Flo. The destination was Mt. Princeton and the drive ahead of us was a few hours so we wanted to get an early start in order to summit before noon. Looking back on the trip, three huge things stand out.

We had so much preparation: grocery shopping, picking out outfits, packing backpacks, filling water bottles.

We has so much excitement: struggling to fall asleep the night prior because of the fun day to come, chatting in the car before sunrise of the amazing day ahead,

And we had so little attentiveness: missing the trailhead leading up the 14-er entirely.

Yeah, you read that correctly. We truly did miss the one marker that is absolutely key to a successful hike.

Yeah, you can probably guess how intelligent we feel in retrospect. We made sure the first rest stop was a local Buena Vista Brewery to toast some beers to our collective stupidity.

Just on a side note, this missed marker was not a little tiny sign hidden beside a tree overgrown with bushes and words darkened with lichen. Nope, it was a remarkably noticeable set of rock stairs with many piles of stacked rocks right at the front to demarcate it as the confirmed trailhead by previous hikers. And, not only were we not on the right trail when we started hiking, we just weren’t on a trail at all. I am talking a massive rock pile (roughly 1500 feet high) with no evidence of previous travel besides the three 60 year old women ahead of us. They repeatedly expressed their lack of knowledge about the trail, yet we continued to follow them. Let this be a lesson in following the crowd, kids.

On a real note though, this trip that went so seemingly wrong was actually such an incredible learning experience for the four of us on the hike together. For myself, this was the first time I really had to understand the meaning of the well-known cliché: “life is about the journey and not the destination”. We are so often told that we should strive for a job, marriage, perfect family photo, vacation, bank account, or whatever else the world is constantly putting in front of us. And, if I am being honest, that dream of a “perfect” life plopped down in front of me is often a huge temptation. I have dreamt of a life full of plush niceties and immediately asked myself questions like: Do I want another degree because I love learning this or because letters after my name make for more stature in social circles? Do I want that job because of the experience or because of the title? Will I want that marriage because I am madly in love or because tax breaks and a nice face to be beside sound desirable? Will I really want that car or am I so caught up in what it will say about the money I bring home to my mansion and perfectly primped kids?

This morning spent on a mountain, getting nowhere fast but laughing and enjoying my friends’ company was such a neat picture of the journey being worlds more important than the destination. No, I would not have gone into this hike thinking, “we should definitely aim for getting lost and not reaching the peak but I do not care what happens between now and the point of getting back to the car.” No one does that, at least that I know of. No one goes on fun adventures with the plan being one of, get ‘er done, make it to the end, and don’t enjoy the time spent getting there. The failed hike was all about the in between and not at all about where we ended up.

The funny thing is, we so often hold ourselves to logic that is just as backwards as that seems. We say, “today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business, and make a profit” (James 4:13). We do not care what the in-between is, as long as at the end of it we are making money and looking good from the white picket fence at the curb half a yard away.

What does that even mean, y’all?

What does it mean to have so little concern for the part of life that is actually life? Life isn’t a paycheck and a nicely decorated house to let people look at. It isn’t a nice façade of “holding it all together” built up after years of leaving love, joy, laughs, and your peoples’ quality time together behind for the cause of reaching some elusive goal. Life is the journey that takes us to all of the wonderful destinations set ahead of us.

I also feel that I should say that this is just one example of something that can creep into all of our lives, no matter how much your own dream destination strays from the ones mentioned here. It may be that in the place of money, comfort, and stature is success in some other area of life. It could be any part of your life that may become so all consuming that logic is lost and desire to live and love fall on the backburner to the desire to win and build pride and be affirmed.

This all does not go to say that any of the qualities or destinations delved into is inherently bad. So many of those successes are good, good things that are achieved in the most beautiful of ways. Hard work will be rewarded. There is a line between working hard to steward our gifts and working hard to get ahead of the other playing the game; I think each of us knows in our own hearts on which side of that line we stand.

The mountain I hiked this morning taught me so much more than I could have asked for. It is beautiful to get to experience that kind of seclusion in God’s creation where His presence is so real and His nudges about things He wants my heart to soften to become so tangible. My prayer is that this hits home with someone else as it did me this morning.

God is good, He is gracious, and He so desires so much for His beloved to find and feel peace and patience and gentleness and kindness in this place. Let’s make it a plan not to let the desire to make it to the destination take away the huge blessing of getting to feel each precious detail of the life lived along the way.