thoughts 5

I remember not too long ago (when I was more buff) deciding with some old friends of mine to hike to the top of one of the mountain trails that resided east a little ways from the small Orange County suburb that we grew up in. It was part of the Saddleback/Santa Ana Mountain range - the trail (or at least the beginning of the trail) was known as the Holy Jim trail.

I think there were a lot of time that I, as a kid, looked at the mountains from the deceptive distance of my parents' second story window and really didn't think a whole lot of it. When I got older, I think I took note of how the sun setting in the west would cast some pretty awesome colors onto the age old mountain range. But I still didn't care much more than to affirm that they were there, in the distance.

When I became a Christian, one of the strangest changes that happened in me that maybe sometimes I really overlook was my sudden love (craving) for the outdoors. Maybe with school studies and other things that tend to occupy the majority of my time, I don't get out and hike or camp as much as I really want to. But I definitely remember being in community college, all of a sudden finding myself at this trail from time to time, more and more frequently, hiking to the water fall, finding hidden silver mines, playing with the newts - anything and everything. We all loved going to Holy Jim, for some reason.

But I really, really wanted to hike to the top. I guess the urge to get to the top of that thing built and built until we finally went and did it towards the beginning of last summer.

And it's always so funny to me, how God seems to bring things full circle all the time. And when you start to think that particular circle might have reached it's end, you realize that the circle was much bigger than you originally thought. Sometimes that circle started decades before you were even born.

I learned a lot of things from that trip. Even today, I'm still learning.

It was more than just a silly hike with some good childhood friends. It was more than just my trying to prove something. It was one of those hard lessons in life, that was so visual, so hands on, so parallel to everything I'm learning or I'd been learning up to that point that - as crazy as it seemed - would be even crazier for me to ignore.

One of the greatest things that I learned, though, was that a team - any team - needs a strong leader - not physically, no. But a strong leader, whose strength is best shown by his commitment to empowering his team to reach a particular goal, and his ability to do so, realizing that his position is to lead from the front, from behind, and from within the team. I learned that his team is only as strong as it's weakest member, and past of his commitment to serving his team encompasses the empowerment of the weakest member to succeed in making it to the top.

I learned that if there hadn't been a strong leader, no one would've made it to the top. I learned that a leader needs to convey the vision properly to his team. And I learned that the leader takes at the very least EVERY single step his team takes to make it to their destination, but a good leader will usually take more so - and it's not always forward.

In our success, I learned how I failed - in in my failure, I learned how to better succeed.

One thing was for sure, though: A leader should have some good sense as to what he's up against, but he should also be readying both himself and the entire team for the possibility (or inevitability) of encountering the unknown.

None of us had hiked this mountain, before. But I wasn't unfamiliar with what it took to hike to the top. Hiking wasn't foreign to me. Neither were physical demands of the mountain and the sun as they worked together against my body.

See, we'd seen the mountain from a distance for a long, long time. We'd eventually started coming closer and closer to the summit, venturing further and further in. But none of us tasted the reality of the venture to the top until we'd gone further than we'd ever gone before, and made the conscious decision not to turn back.

At any rate, we made it to the top. I learned more about my friends, that day, from the long periods of silence than I'd learned from most of our conversations up to that point.

This past month has been very affirming. The reality of where the Lord is taking us is getting closer and closer. I'm starting to see the trail head... And I'm realizing there really won't be any kind of map. Just a narrow road, from here on out. And the further we get in, the closer we will all get to the point of no return.