We're leaving our tiny apartment, our cellphones, our shower, and even this laptop...
We are leaving all of the amenities of modern American life to spend time getting dirty, sleeping on the ground, climbing over rocks and streams, and pushing our endurance.
Just thinking of this makes me smile.
For anyone who has never been backpacking, I reccomend it zealously. It is an experience that you cannot possibly understand until you try it.
Because, if nothing else, it makes you realize how much we have in our lives that we don't take time appreciate.
Being outside with only what God created surrounding you is an incredible experience.
He made so much beauty, and all we can think to do is "improve" it, usually destroying it in the process. Why are we so presumptuous to think that we are better designers than our Father?
True, He gave us the ability to think and dream for ourselves, and sometimes He is the one who gives us those dreams and ideas...so you could go so far as to say that most of the modern technology we enjoy are also part of God's creation.
But there is still something so much more awe-inspiring about our world before we humans go and trample over things. Before we take "our" big ideas, our pride and our arrogance and put them to good use for destruction, there is a beauty...a stillness that could only come from our creator.
That stillness is what I experience when I go hiking, or even just for a walk outside. There is nothing like it. I would swear to you that being out there solves all of life's problems by putting them in perspective. By making them obsolete.
Being outside, truly outside, forces you to look at the bigger picture. To see what really matters.
To see life for what it actually is.
To truly see and feel everything around you.
All that is alive and breathing.
All that are what God made.
All that makes us alive.
