Foster Wisdom Chaser

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8308-7949-6
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 187 Seiten

It began with a simple question:'One day I found myself asking my father, across the chasm between us, 'Hey Dad, you want to climb the highest mountain in Colorado?''And for Nathan Foster and his father, Richard, that simple question changed everything. With no hiking experience to draw on, they embarked on a journey of physical challenge, discovering just how far they could push themselves. For Nathan a parallel journey took him inside himself.Having grown up in the shadow of a famous father, Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline, Nathan had a lot of questions about who his father really was. Would hiking open the door for him to get to know this distant figure?As the one-time experiment evolved into a decade of challenging hikes up Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks, the Fourteeners, Nathan navigated his twenties-finishing college, choosing a career, a possible cross-country move, the early years of marriage and a major personal crisis. Along the way he would discover exactly what his father could offer him.This book also includes an afterword by Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline and coauthor of Longing for God.

Nathan Foster is assistant professor of social work at Spring Arbor University in Spring Arbor, Michigan. He previously served as director of Door of Hope Counseling and Consulting (Arvada, Colorado). His website is www.nathanfosterprojects.com.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Foster, Nathan

Leseproben

2

The Beating on
Mount Elbert

Our mountain adventure was planned. At 14,333 feet, Mount Elbert is the highest peak in the state of Colorado. The eastern route is over eleven miles, ascending 4,833 feet. indicated that the excursion would take nine hours round-trip. Although it sounds impressive, Elbert is actually one of Colorado’s easier fourteeners to scale, requiring nothing technical. Yet the thought of its sheer magnitude impressed us both. Our challenge was set.

All of the literature about climbing a mountain of this height insists that a summit must be completed before noon, since nearly every afternoon dangerous lightning storms descend upon the peaks. This mandates a very early start. I hate getting up early; my father rises with the sun like clockwork. After a great deal of debate, we decided on a 5:30 a.m. start.

We bickered a bit about what we should take. Dad deferred to me as the expert, since I had skimmed part of a book and was able to talk confidently about what little knowledge I had. This, you will recognize, is the common criteria for leadership in our culture. Our expedition was no different.

We had an array of different foods, emergency overnight gear, winter storm attire and as much water as we could cram into our cheaply constructed backpacks that were designed for middle-schoolers. Dad’s pack was blue with a neon “All Pro” patch proudly proclaiming his athleticism. Mine was black and not quite as embarrassing.

Then Dad got out his prized walking stick. Carved into its hilt was the image of an old man with a long beard blowing in the wind. It looked very cool—and horribly impractical. I pointed out that it probably weighed a good ten pounds, but Dad insisted on taking it. He would need it to fight off the bears, he said. This gave me free reign to pack a little luxury item myself. With much skill I secured a frothy bottle of Dr Pepper to the outside of my pack. I confess: I was an addict, and I enjoyed seeing my dad roar with hilarity at the ridiculousness of it.

My soda, his stick and our little-kid backpacks: we were set. On a cold June morning, two utter novices set out to brave the great unknown.

At the trailhead I rested against a tree in the dark, leisurely smoking a cigarette. I adopted the brave swagger of a veteran Air Force pilot before his greatest mission. My daydream was abruptly interrupted by my father’s burst of laughter and the sight of him struggling to maintain his balance after strapping on his pack. We had failed to consider what it would be like to carry these packs; they were too heavy and uncomfortable for a day’s journey. After discarding what we could—excluding the Dr Pepper and trusty walking stick—we ventured up the moonlit trail with a dawning realization of the torture ahead of us.

In some situations, all you can do is laugh—at least, all Dad could do was laugh, and occasionally comment on how he couldn’t believe I had talked him into this. It was probably the ridiculous nature of this endeavor that made him giddy. I was serious; there was work to be done, goals to achieve. But his laughter, as it would many times later, helped maintain a sense of lightness about the whole event.

Bird song announced the arrival of the morning sun. The forest seemed filled with wonder and excitement. Witnessing the altering landscape as our elevation increased summoned our latent anticipation. Climate changes at such altitudes are remarkable. In June, you can just as easily expect snow as blistering heat. That day it was all heat.

By midmorning we had reached timberline. Unprotected by the high alpine forest, we hiked in open sun, which bore down on us with great intensity. I could see the trail meandering up the hill and around the bend, up and up and up. The heat of the sun at this altitude was merciless. It dried up our words to the briefest of exchanges.

“This sucks,” I muttered to my father, gasping for air. He smiled and laughed a soft, strong laugh. Twenty steps later I continued my lament. “I don’t know if I can make it,” I said.

“Me neither,” he smiled.

We were beaten, badly. My head throbbed in unison with my rapidly beating heart. My legs ached like never before. I was dizzy from lack of oxygen. I felt truly miserable.

But as I looked back down the mountain, gauging our progress, a very odd thing happened: I fell in love with this kind of self-torture. Something about my wronged body suddenly began to feel right—the sensation was so raw and real. There we were in the thick of battle, two men fighting for every step. I had never felt this type of passion or intensity before. I was hooked. At the start, I don’t believe either of us had really expected to summit that day. But the more we hiked, the more our challenge presented itself, and the more determined we became.

At last we reached the summit. We filled the thin air with joyous, exhausted laughter. I felt like a warrior from the days of old.Leaning proudly against his weathered hiking stick, my father sat in awe at our accomplishment. I sat on my torn backpack, slowly savoring my spoils: a ninety-degree Dr Pepper that never tasted better. As I had expected, I was overcome by the majesty of sitting on top of the world. What I didn’t expect was to be moved by something much smaller. Vegetation on the top of a mountain of this height is a rare sight. At first glance, the mountainside looks rocky and dusty, but as I took a closer look, an ecological wonder unfolded. Nestled in the cracks of the rocks grew a miniature world of plant life. There were miniscule flowers everywhere, arrayed in purple, yellow and blue. How anything grows in such a harsh climate is beyond me. Equally stunning is how easily such beauty can be missed. I had been staring at the ground out of sheer exhaustion and had simply stumbled across this flora wonderland. What I didn’t notice was that a shift between father and son had begun.

From my vantage point at the start of our climb on that June day, far too early in the morning for humans to be awake, I had seen my father and me as polar opposites. As we worked our way up the hot and dusty trail, however, I began to see similarities between us. The harder the task, the more we both wanted it. Two things were clear: we were both badly out of shape, and we were both scrappy, stubborn fighters. I had known my own propensity to fight, but I had not known my father’s, and it greatly surprised me. This was the same man who would marvel at flowers all day long, the praying pacifist who wore gloves whenever there was work to do.

Somewhere in the haze of our strenuous activity, I remembered a day from the past. After not being allowed to attend my best friend’s birthday party, I had thrown the biggest fit of my life. I remember standing on my bed, screaming at Dad. He countered me, doing the stern father thing, and we went back and forth, fighting for power. Then my father did the strangest thing: he knelt down and closed his eyes. This act enraged me all the more. I demanded that he get up and fight me, but his only posture was silence. What was he doing? Was he being weak? Shutting me out? I didn’t understand it, but eventually it stopped the fight.

That event had left me feeling two distinct things: ashamed for the way I had behaved and deeply moved by my dad’s action. That day on the side of the windy mountain, I was moved by him once again. I looked over at him and noticed the sweat pouring from his brow, the shaking of his calves from the strain. He was a fighter. I saw strength in my father, and it was beautiful.

Now I dared to ask myself the question:

The irony of climbing a fourteener is that just when you are celebrating the accomplishment of having made it to the top, you have to turn around and go back down the way you came. This can be a cruel and methodical process. The trip down is much easier cardiovascularly, but physically it held a new set of challenges. My legs, weak from the journey, often buckled as I pounded out thousands of steps.

As we reversed direction to return to the trailhead, I began to think about what was facing me after this triumphant climb. I was returning to a lot of uncertainty. My twenty-two years of life as a relative failure haunted me. It seemed that I failed at everything I tried, the most notable being school. After dropping out of high school, I had served brief stints of marginal ruin at four different colleges. Finally, after spending a week laboring over my one-page application essay, I had been accepted into Colorado State University and was planning to study social work in the coming months. Thank God for provisional admission status.

It is an understatement to say that I was feeling uncertain about my ability to succeed in college. More accurately, I was terrified. I was motivated by the horror of a thousand countless hours of mind-numbing labor in crappy jobs I had endured. I had to do this. There was an unfulfilled longing boiling up in me from deep inside, and it refused to be ignored. I to do this.

Could my internal churning possibly be what my dad had felt at the prospect of ignoring his dreams and instead working in insurance for the rest of his life? At fourteen thousand feet, the distance between two poles has a funny way of shrinking.

Descending Mount Elbert, I could hardly believe that in just two months I would once again be facing my own personal insurmountable peak: college. I was headed back to a painful, failure-ridden environment. I was being given another chance, but I assumed...