Part One: “Light Climbing”

“Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,” Hebrews 12:1

Twenty years ago, I was consumed with mountain biking.

As soon as spring arrived, I’d be out on the bike carving up the trails with my brother-in-law Jeff. It was nothing for us to ride twenty-plus miles of wooded, hilly terrain every weekend. The distance was never a problem for us, we had decent young legs and lungs propelling us.

The killer workout came with the steep climbs that were scattered through the trails: and we knew them all very well.

It’s always the climbs that test you, whether you’re on a mountain bike or just traversing life’s trails.

Most people can go through life as long as the path is fairly smooth and flat. But when they’re forced to “get out of the saddle” and start climbing uphill, they quickly find out what they’re made of…and what is lacking.

No matter which mountain bike trail we were riding on, we always made it a point to call out the climbs ahead of us. The quiet forest solitude would be broken when Jeff or I called out “CLIMB!” Announcing this out loud warned the other person to get ready to focus, downshift gears, and work hard. The new trails were always the worst, when neither of us knew where the climbs would be. And when they came, they all had factors that made them difficult: steepness, sand, rocks, ruts, tree roots, and length.

I currently weigh 160 pounds, but twenty years ago I was 130 pounds soaking wet. I may have been a beanpole, but I also didn’t have a lot of weight to move uphill. When you’re climbing on a mountain bike, you want to be as light as possible. Any extra weight has to be carried by YOU. Despite my light physical weight, the climbs were never easy, they still required hard effort to make it to the top.

Along the road of life, God will give us climbing trials to test our spiritual fitness. It may be some sudden news that forces us to dig in and push through a difficult situation. It could be a sudden incident that causes us to immediately take remedial action. We had a sewer line back up into the dining room a few years ago, and I was “climbing” for hours to get things cleaned up and corrected. What a challenging, difficult mess that revealed some excess baggage called “anger” and “impatience”.

The trials of life should reveal our strengths, weakness, and conditioning. They also reveal any excess baggage that we’re towing through life. I’ve passed a lot of people who’ve “gassed out” during a steep mountain bike climb…but I’ve also been the one to pull over with my heart pounding, lungs on fire, and unable to crank my legs even one more turn. And then I’d watch amazed as someone would crank past me like a locomotive, cresting the steep hill and disappearing over it.

Friends, we all get hit with trials in life. We all have to climb at some point. Those climbs will be much easier to handle if we shed our excess baggage (Sin, addiction, complacency, apathy, ignorance, toxic people, etc.).

What can you shed that will make your life trials easier to climb?

Whatever it is, dump it soon.