Getting Picked Last

Everyone knows that familiar, horrible situation. The kids are all lines up in the playground, about to play kickball, with two team captains taking turns picking kids for their teams. They'll start by picking the biggest, strongest, fastest players, and slowly descend through the ranks of increasingly unskilled players, until they reach the end, when someone has to be picked last. Someone has to be the worst. Someone has to be picked last, and no one wants to be that person.

Most of my life, I've been picked first, or at least middle of the pack. A few times I was probably picked near the bottom, on those rare occasions I volunteered to play a game of some sport I cared nothing about. Who cares if I get picked near the end for basketball? I could care less for that sport. Soccer, football, kickball, dodgeball, the games I loved as a kid, I was good at them, and people picked me near the front, rather than near the end.

Last weekend, all of the men at our church took a weekend trip to north Wales, to go hiking in the mountains of Snowdonia. Now, hiking falls into the category of things I love, of things I consider myself to be good at. With soccer, not with basketball. Two and a half years ago, I was the guy who sprinted halfway down the mountain to make sure we were going the right way to catch our bus back to Oxford, then ran back up the mountain to tell everyone else to hurry up. I'm the guy that dreams about hiking the entire Appalachian Trail non-stop, from Georgia to Maine (that's already planned out every day of the four month journey). I'm the guy that had to take my future wife to the top of a mountain before I could propose, because anything less wouldn't be good enough. Hiking is my thing (one of them, at least). I was really excited for this trip.

So, it caught me quite by surprise when I turned out to be the weakest link. I couldn't keep up. I was too slow. I was too weak. I wasn't good enough. I was the one slowing everyone else down. If we had been picking teams, I should have been picked last.

But the guys picked me first. That's what blows me away about that trip, more than even the spectacular views (photos below). The kindness and sympathy of every guy on that trip was amazing to me. I'd never experienced anything like it. If the roles had been reversed, I wouldn't have done the same. I would have been annoyed with me, I would have told me to suck it up and go faster, to stop being such a wimp. That's exactly what I've done in the past, when others haven't been able to keep up with me. But they were completely patient, encouraging, and understanding. It was quite an eye-opener to me, to see, by the contrast they provided, how badly I have treated people in similar situations in the past. Somehow, I've always held it somewhere in my head, that if you simply try a little harder, push yourself a little further, then you can do anything. If you fail, it's simply a matter of not trying hard enough. If you can't keep up, it's just because you're not willing to push yourself hard enough.

That weekend though, I got quite a large helping of humble pie, and I think God really used this situation to help me learn that my previous conceptions were absolutely and completely wrong. He had to show me what I have claimed to already know in my head: that people are imperfect; they have limitations which no amount of willpower can surpass; there are things we simply cannot do on our own power, no matter how we try. And let me tell you, He showed me.

I've never tried harder at anything in my life. I've equaled that amount of effort before, but I know I have never surpassed it, because there is simply nothing beyond that. That's all there is. I literally tried as hard as I could; I have never tried harder, because there is no harder for me. But I still couldn't do it. By the end, I had reached the point where I couldn't take more than 10 steps without having to stop for breath, to rest. It was pathetic, and embarrassing. But there was nothing I could do; it was beyond my power.

So how did this happen? Well, I think God did it on purpose, obviously. But the way He carried it out was thus: first, I forgot my inhaler. I was diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma a few years ago, but it's only been in the last year or so that I've really started noticing how much of a difference it makes with my breathing. And usually, whatever I'm doing is just for a couple hours, so I never bother with my inhaler beforehand, and only use it afterwards if I'm really struggling. So I have never really gotten into the habit of using it properly when I exercise. So I forgot it the one time I really really needed it. With the elevation and the cold, the air was just so much more difficult to breath, making the need for my inhaler exponentially higher. Then, to top it off, the pipes froze at the bunkhouse we were staying in, so there was no running water. It was heated by radiators, so no running water also means no heat. So we had to start a fire in a wood burning stove, but we couldn't get the flu working properly for a while, so I had a nice three or four hours of smoke inhalation, before going to sleep in sub-freezing temperatures. So my lungs were pretty much in the worst shape of my life. So I was having a really hard time breathing on the way up.

Our bunkhouse.

I made it to the top though, about the same time as everyone else. I struggled, but I managed to push through it, and made it up without having to slow everyone else down too much, I hope.

(I felt like the kid from Christmas Story with all the layers of clothes I had on.)

Then, we split into two groups, to go two different directions. I tried to pick the one that sounded easier. I chose wrong, of course. We changed our mind about which way we wanted to go, and eventually ended up scaling along a sheer face of rock.

It was really only about one or two steps removed from all out rock climbing. Except it was icy and slippery. Wearing gloves and big hiking boots didn't help, and with the fatigue setting in so heavily in my muscles, I did not feel safe. I didn't feel like I could trust my own body to keep me from falling if I slipped. In the past, I might have been a bit more reckless and foolish, and just gone on with everyone else. But about three quarters of the way across this rock face, I thought about Chelsea, and what would happen to her if I got hurt. I remembered promising her I would be safe and wouldn't do anything stupid. So when Pete decided that, rather than continue scaling across the side of this mountain, he was going work his way to the bottom, walk along the path and take it back up the mountain on the other side to meet back up with everyone, I decided to go with him.

Of course, this also was the wrong decision, partly based on my own understanding of where our final destination was. So, in the end, it turned out that the bit of climbing and scaling I skipped was really the easiest part. And since I went down with Pete, I also had to climb all the way back up to meet everyone. I simply did not have the energy to spare for such an adventure. When we met back up with them, they explained that we actually had to go all the way back up to the top of Snowdon to get back to the bunkhouse. So I ended up climbing Snowdon, the second highest peak in the UK, twice, on a bad set of lungs. This is when I couldn't go more than 10 steps at a time. It was pretty awful. We ended up being quite a few hours later than we intended to be because of me, and eventually had to finish the last bit of the walk home in the dark, with flashlights. This also meant we had to take a longer, safer way down in the dark. So it took even longer. All because of me. I felt pretty bad for doing that to all of them.

But then we went to the pub for dinner. When I said they picked me first, I meant it. One of the guys declared that we had to have a "Man of the Mountain" and a "Muppet of the Mountain," the best and worst guy on the hike, respectively. He selected me as the man of the mountain. When I should have been the worst, he selected me as the best. Even if he didn't think so much about it, even if he just was trying to be nice and me feel better, it was a beautiful picture to me of the way God treats us. When we deserve the worst, He gives us His best. When we simply can't do it, no matter how hard we try, when we fail, over and over, He still loves us and tells us we're His cherished ones.

The next day, they all decided to do a much shorter trip and then had back to London kind of early. I was hoping that I might be able to keep up this time, since it was shorter, but deep down I knew that it was too late. My body had been through too much the day before, and there's no way it would recover in less than 24 hours. So I stayed with them as long as I could, and when I couldn't keep up with them any longer, I was just going to turn around and go back, and wait for them at the car. Pete decided to go with me though, since he actually wanted to leave even earlier than everyone else, and he had already climbed that particular mountain 5 or 6 times. So that was really nice of him, and again I was just so humbled by how nice everyone was to me.

Despite all of that, I still had a really awesome time. I really enjoyed just hanging out with the guys and some of the views were amongst the best I have ever seen. I've uploaded a bunch of landscape-y photos to my website, here.

Also, at the top of Snowdon, we just happened to see a couple of guys getting ready to jump off the side of the mountain!

Okay, well, they had paragliders, but still. It was insane. They're going to use some of my photos for a video they're making of the jump, so hopefully they'll send me a link to that soon and I can pass that on here.

That's all for now. We've just come back from Macclesfield visiting Sunday and her family, so Chelsea will be posting about that soon enough (so we're about a week behind on the blog at the moment...hopefully Chelsea will catch us back up a little, since I am obviously unreliable).