Tag: mountaintop experiences

After the Mountaintop: So What and Now What?

Two of the questions everyone seems to want answers for are: “So what?” and “Now what?” Those are the questions that beget action. They need a response.

We were just talking about “mountaintop experiences,” or those experiences where something has opened up for you, you have seen (been shown) and felt something that changes you, or that changes everything. Now what? If you have this incredible experience and then just go back to things just the way they were, then what good is it? What was it for?

You’ve got to act. You’ve got to do something. What that something is is different for everyone and inherent to who we are–it involves our unique talents and passion. It is what defines us.

Over the past couple years, I’ve had St. Paul on my mind, especially gearing up for a study on Romans this fall. Most of us will never know Paul’s clarity or conviction. His mountaintop experience was an encounter with the Risen Christ that left him blind for a few days, and completely transformed his life. He went from being an all around not-so-nice guy to being a prolific letter-writing, missionary master, New Testament first ballot hall of famer. Even changed his name.

What we take from our game-changing experiences doesn’t have to involve evangelism, like Paul. It could be anything–working with kids, creating art, pushing yourself and those around you to be better, kinder; inspiring others through… what? That’s for you to decide. But it involves change. It involves action. It channels your passion. It engages your talent. It calls us to pass it on, to pay it forward.

I know I sound like a broken record at times. We’ve all got our soapboxes to stand on. I come back to a lot of the same things: being outside and experiencing God’s creation. I find peace, have some of my most profound thoughts, and talk to God when I am running, hiking, or walking. I am inspired, uplifted, and overflowing at times when reading and/or writing. And I am lit up beyond words in small groups of great people.

Over the past 10 years, some of my most meaningful experiences and relationships have been come from a group of early morning runners, which has created oddball adventures, lifelong friendships, and ultimately even helped me find a home at Christ Church Easton.

I love this notion that N.T. Wright has in “Simply Christian:”

“We honor and celebrate our complexity and our simplicity by continually doing five things. We tell stories. We act out rituals. We create beauty. We work in communities. We think out our beliefs… In and through all these things run the threads of love and pain, fear and faith, worship and doubt, the quest for justice, the thirst for spirituality, and the promise and problem of human relationship. And if there is any such thing as “truth,” in some absolute sense, it must relate to, and make sense of, all this and more.”

Drink from that fire hose for a bit. When I think through those five things and how they relate to my life, I think back on some of my best memories and look forward to meaningful experiences to come.

“So what?” and “Now what?” I feel like as individuals and as a society, these are questions we constantly ask and come back to. Sometimes they can leave us stuck in the starting gate wondering what to do. And sometimes they can call us to action.

Mountaintop Experiences

Sometimes hospitals can be mountaintops. Mountaintop experiences are those moments or experiences in our lives that rearrange things, change our hearts, bring us closer to God.

Two years ago today, while visiting her mom’s family in Pennsylvania, Ava had a seizure that led her to be flown by helicopter to Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. I was sitting in my sun room at home at 9pm, and got a phone call, and was on the road within a few minutes.

She spent 10 days in pediatric intensive care and all told about a month in the hospital between neurology and the rehab unit. After EKGs and MRIs and who knows what other acronyms, the likely diagnosis was that Epstein-Barr Virus had gotten into her spine, and caused her brain to swell and provoked that and subsequent and ongoing seizures. The doctors, nurses, and technicians at Children’s were rock stars, stayed the course and sent Ava home to conquer 5th grade. Since then, she has been on medication to manage her seizures and we have learned a bit about the world of provoked epilepsy. Ava’s has been a good story, with her making honor roll at school, playing sports, and living a mostly normal life, albeit mornings and evenings feeling like a pharmacy.

Mountaintops are what you make of them. The main thing I remember is the amazing support, prayers, good vibes and good deeds from so many people. It redefined what community meant to me. What Ava went through, and her attitude, and watching her come back to herself gave me a sense of gratitude I wouldn’t have come to any other way. It showed me first-hand, the way a community of people praying can change the heart(s) of the people being prayed for. I have been in a constant and growing conversation with God since (not that I always listen the first time or catch what He’s saying).

Yesterday’s Gospel reading and sermon at Christ Church Easton were about a mountaintop experience–Luke’s story of Peter, John, and James witnessing Jesus’s transfiguration, “And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.”(Luke 9:29). You can’t get much more mountaintop than that. I like how Frederick Buechner brings transfiguration back to everyday life:

“Even with us something like that happens once in a while. The face of a man walking his child in the park, of a woman picking peas in the garden, of sometimes even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, say, or standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just having a beer at a Saturday baseball game in July. Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it’s almost beyond bearing.”

When I think back to two years ago in the hospital and getting home, I have seen that look on a face. It was there in Anna caring for her sister; it was there in Ava getting home, excited to see her friends and start the school year. And because of that mountaintop experience, when I remember to look with the eyes of my heart, I see it now.