A View from Lookout Mountain

This is me on a mountain - far from my normal routine. A mito mom friend, Amy, invited me to leave town and this was the view outside our room on Lookout Mountain two weekends ago. The sky was ocean blue; the temperature crisp, but not cold; and the conversation nonstop. So we paid the entrance fee to Rock City - which was radical living for me.

My knee scooter and I couldn't navigate fat mans squeeze or the rope swing. In fact, it didn't take long for me to make sure I was on the handicap path, avoiding slopes and stairs. The walk wasn't too long so one scoot at a time I made it to a vantage point well worth the effort.

Amy and I sat in rockers till closing time, chatting while gazing over the mountains edge. When I barely had enough time to scoot back to the entrance, I got crazy and climbed three stairs so she could photograph me on this bridge.  

Then we traded places.

As we prepared to leave, an tourist photographed us together. And this is my favorite photo because time with Amy changed me. Iron sharpened iron so when I came down the mountain, life was better than before.

I'm still amazed how sharing one another's burdens lightens your own; how time with a kindred spirit eases the journey and offers perspective lost in day to day drudgery. Time on the mountain reminded me that He is big and our problems very small, for, "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heaven's like a canopy and spreads them out like a tent to live in." (Is. 40: 22) For "He has established His throne in heaven and His kingdom rules over all!!" (Ps. 103: 19)

We live under God's big tent sky and are such a blip in the realm of eternity that when I grasp that for more than twenty-three minutes, my worries dissolve into "light and momentary troubles (that) are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all." (2 Cor. 4:17)

It's not that my problems aren't real. It's just that Creator of the Universe is so much bigger.

It took two weeks for my mitochondria to catch up after our weekend away. I napped more than normal and lived the bare necessities. But my heart has been full to overflowing, for "I am confident of this; I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." (Ps. 27: 13)