DisGrace 02 - Uphill

There was a lot of uphill time today.  My Fitbit tells me that I did 22,796 steps with the equivalent of 170 flights of stairs.  Suffice to say that my legs are sore tonight.  I did a hike this morning per the recommendation of a friend of mine, but he neglected to tell me that the walk to the trailhead was not an insignificant walk (especially uphill).  The trail was wonderful but the process of getting there was far more than I expected.  The same thing happened later in the day as I hiked up the Lookout Trail here at Montreat.  I knew what to expect this time in the walk to the trailhead (was actually the same as the one from the morning), but then the trail was far more than I expected it to be.  There were a lot of steps that had been built into the trail, but they weren't normal steps - they took a lot of work to get up.  The last chunk of the hike did not have the steps, but instead was a lot of rock stepping to get to the top.  But it was a great great great hike.  I loved it.

But here's the thing.  As I walked up to the trailhead this morning after breakfast for my first hike, I was thinking about the work of reconciliation ahead of us.  We may think that the process is easy (and some think that the process is already done) but its far from it.  It is hard work, not just the process of reconciling, but sometimes even the process of getting there.  One of the speakers this weekend shared that for some who have not entered into this before, asking to move towards reconciliation and fighting the sin of racism is like asking a person who doesn't do much other than sit on the couch and eat cheetos to get up and run a marathon that afternoon.

That's one of the things that I am hearing over and over this week - its a hard process that we have to be a part of.  It takes a lot of work every step of the way.  But it is worth it.  It is worth it because Christ calls us to it and because it is who we are called to become.

But until we come to the mountaintop, its one step after another...