Moving Mountains
I love the fall season. I love the colors of the season and the holidays. And it gives me the opportunity to delve into some of my favorite comfort foods that are perfect and ripe this time of year. “Fall” is symbolic of harvest or abundance so to speak but is also a season of things dying. The leaves are beautiful, yet they fall away from their life source. Change is also beautiful if you allow the process to naturally run its course. The month of November has always served as a visual reminder that I should always not only embrace change but to be optimistic. Autumn usually represents death. And unfortunately, all things have to die. But “Thanksgiving” is also a great reminder to give thanks for all things. I love meeting with family and indulging in the sin of gluttony like most people, however reflecting on the things that I’ve grown from to acknowledging the things that I need to let to let die in my life are hallmarks. And these things to me have served as the proverbial mountains in my life. Traditionally, I’ve always referred to Matthew 17:20,
20 “Because you’re not yet taking God seriously,” said Jesus. “The simple truth is that if you had a mere kernel of faith, a mustard seed, say, you would tell this mountain, ‘Move!’ and it would move. There is nothing you wouldn’t be able to tackle.”
As a scripture that I’ve given a lot of oxygen to, I’ve told, whispered, spoken to, yelled at the top of my lungs at, and even cursed at the mountains that erected before me in my life. I thought I had faith. I was taught that all I had to do is “tell this mountain to move” and it would. And if I could be completely honest, most of the time “it” didn’t. And when “it” didn’t move initially, I made the hasty decision to foolishly attempt to “climb” the mountain, which only resulted in either me losing my grip or footing and slipping down to the bottom of this mountain covered in the rubble that accompanied me on the way down. Thankfully, I learned a huge lesson this year. Recently, I came across a quote from Confucius that said, “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
And while I was surprised that I had never noticed this before, by being in a new environment, I was able to identify with these sentiments quite differently. This quote helped me realize that while faith moves mountains, faith without works is also dead. My approach was all wrong. I consistently struggled with trying to move my mountain by deadlifting it. Or yelling at God and questioning why was this mountain still here, or even better, why hadn’t he made it magically disappear? I condemned myself. I self-sabotaged His love for me. And I completely ignored the grace that I had been given. And I never recognized the simple question of how this mountain got there in the first place. Mountains are formed when the Earth’s crust smashes against each other and buckles up like the hood of a car in a head-on collision. All those years of ignorance, dysfunctional cycles, and bad habits had formed a crust thicker than a Chicago Stuffed pizza, and life just kept smashing up against each other repeatedly without me ever engaging in, addressing the problems, or making a valid effort to face it. But thankfully, this past season of “mountain climbing” taught me that rock bottom will teach you lessons that mountaintops never will. And even though I had faith, what if I had been assigned this mountain to show others that it could be moved? We move mountains, one stone at a time. When we have an issue or want to make a change in our lives, sometimes we can only focus on the mountain. We are often discouraged because it looks too big, and we get anxious or overwhelmed. But every big change starts with one little step. Every Summer season eventually leads to Autumn. So, whatever the “mountain” is in your facing in this season, don’t let it intimidate you.
As a matter of fact, even though you have faith, grab the smallest stone in front of you and make the decision to move that first.
