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for the first time I really felt like someone was listening. I stopped feeling God inside the church. Or with other people. Or really anywhere except when I was out hiking or moving through a landscape. It was like seeing God with my very own eyes instead of closing them and imagining him.
I felt this right in the gut. Having grown up in the church, as I looked back on it I realized, it was never in the four walls i felt His presence. It was never at church i felt understood. I lived for the two times a year i got to escape to the mountains for church camp. I always felt i was alone in this feeling. Now I know, I'm not.
“I realized that I don’t feel comfortable telling people to believe what I believe the way I believe it. I don’t want to tell people to worship as I do. I realized that what I enjoy about mission work is that I am tangibly helping people. And I still want to do that. But for me, I don’t know if I can go back to sitting in a pew.
I always felt drawn to mission work. But after my first mission trip, when I was told by a pastor I had to go share the gospel with people who were just sitting there (I did not feel compelled to share with them), I knew the church's idea of missionary work was not for me. And it was around that time I determined organized religion was not for me. So I chose faith.
My escape was the trail, where life was not easy or comfortable.
I’d realized that everyone was beautifully scarred by life’s wounds. Before, I hadn’t thought of my scars as beautiful, but in facing my fears, and myself, in the dark hours I saw that scars denote healing—they tell our story of triumph. They proclaim our ability to overcome, and to face the Night.
Earlier, I’d taken a few minutes to read comments on my Facebook page. Most were overwhelmingly positive, but there had been a handful of derisive people who’d read about me somewhere and formed opinions based on their own fears, limitations, misconceptions, and world views. They could not understand me and therefore criticized me.
My calling came from the mountains and all that I needed to do to answer was put one foot in front of the other.
“I am who I am and that person is OK. I do what I do because of who I am and what I am meant to be. The wild brings me insurmountable blessing and joy. It makes sense that when I leave it to eke out my survival in society, I spiral into despair.”