When I was in Peru, I got to hike Rainbow Mountain.
That evening, after a long nap in the back of a tour van, I was walking with my tour group to a local Pisco distillery and my group’s guide turned to me and asked what I had done today.
“I went with the group that hiked Rainbow Mountain.” My voice was probably still rattled and gravely with exhaustion.
Sally gasped with enthusiasm. “How was that?”
“Hard.” It had been so hard! And I was so tired, there was nothing else I could think to say. I brightened a little thinking about the end result. “But I did it! I hiked the whole thing, and it was AMAZING!”
“Yes!” Sally shook my shoulder lightly. “That’s my chica! Everything worth doing is hard.”
Everything worth doing is hard.
I have been thinking over the trials and tribulations of the year that will come to live in infamy in our collective memories, 2020. If there ever was a year that was hard, it was that one. Very simple things became a struggle for many people. School wasn’t the same. Seeing friends and family wasn’t the same. Even going to the grocery store and completing a simple task was not the same as it had ever been. Doing life became hard.
In 2020 I had some particular struggles that made just coping sometimes extremely difficult. You see, January of 2020 was when I embarked on the biggest challenge of my professional life. God had asked me to step in at camp as the interim director, something that I did not feel trained or qualified for in the best of times. They say God qualifies the called though, so I put everything I owned into boxes, left my job, and moved out to camp.
Then, it was the worst of times.
But here’s the thing. While it was the worst of times, with financial trouble and maintenance and not even being able to run our normal ministries, at the end of the year I was still standing. Even more impressive, camp was still standing, with money in the bank. We had even accomplished some things. Not any of the things I had expected to accomplish, they were still accomplishments.
Every single day of 2020 was hard. Every single day I felt like I was rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. It was worth doing because keeping camp running was worth doing.
Everything worth doing is hard.
Toward the end of the year, I found myself thinking a great deal about a stupid drippy romance novel I had read and about a throw away scene in it in which the couple stood at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and looked out at the city. The narrative drew our attention to Arc de Triomphe, which was built to honor the people who fought in the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The two characters commiserated over the fact that monuments are never built to honor times of peace and prosperity. Only to honor those who triumphed over adversity. It’s something that is almost universally true. We celebrate, not the thing that was hard but the overcoming of it.
Thinking over 2020 and the trials that are still to come, I cannot help but think, “God, your will is hard. Which means that your triumph will be so much greater.”
I try to think about things that way. To reframe 2020 or the other difficult years in my life not as years of adversity but as years of triumph. That is what they are.
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