the .two

since the shack, almost everyone i know has asked me about multnomah falls. "have you seen it?" "have you been there?" "did you read that book?" "i heard a native american woman jumped off it, is that true?"and so on and so forth. well, you can all back off. this past weekend i hiked all around multnomah falls. here it is in all its splendor.

here is a bonus view from the top, looking down.

now, you may be asking yourself: how did tim get up there? well, i'll gladly answer you: he hiked up there. after that, you may be asking yourself this: isn't tim in terrible shape? well yes, i am in terrible shape. how did this happen?

one fateful day, one of my roommates asked if i wanted to go hiking. i did and decided to go. we were going to go with his 47 year old brother. i figured i'd be safe then. he couldn't do too much, he's 47 afterall. well, i'm an idiot. here is a picture that proves i am an idiot and shows one of the 5 or so waterfalls i saw and what i feel is a decent beard:

you see, chris's brother is working on getting into climbing shape for the spring when he climbs mt. hood again. thus, he was in much better shape than i was hoping he would be. i'm in shape if you count round.

this man led the way: head down, plowing forth. i kept up. we did somewhere like 5.2 miles or so i was told. though, i think it might have been more if the simple math i did was correct. he kept throwing distances at me and i swear they added up to something more like 11.2 miles. either way, there was definitely a .2 involved. if life has taught me anything, it is always the .2 that gets you. the .2 makes your butt hurt, your lower back hurt and basically your entire being hurt.

there always seems to be a little extra that you don't think you can do. typically you can. a lot of the time you don't have a 47-year old man to drive you along. but, you do need somebody or somebodies to push you, to hold you accountable, to be a part of your life. hiking alone is silly.

if there is one thing i am learning out here, it is that having people you care about is precious. i've got a lot of friends, a lot of people i know, that are struggling with life right now. to a degree i am one of them. it sucks to feel like you've got nothing that inspires you, that gives you satisfaction or that you love doing.

we need people. they need us. we weren't meant to live alone, to struggle alone, to be happy alone. as i've read through the old and new testaments these last few months, community has shouted loudest in the text, in God's word. i feel like we need to reach out. living alone is silly.


God is in nature communal. He is trinitarian. He is within a divine community in essence. God is three in one (any attempt i've made to explain this further falls short of that simple truth). what is rediculous is that we are not only invited into the Trinity, Jesus himself prays that we will engage with that fellowship in john 17.

i need to grab a hold of this perspective. i need to realize the value of the offer out on the table. how amazing it is that God wants us. in Christ, we have amazing things in our possession and still more amazing things to come. if you don't believe me, read through the first three chapters of ephesians and hear what this relationship with God does in the believer's life.in the attempts to pursue whatever the heck we are pursuing, we can lose sight of what we can have and what we do have.

in the exhaustion of the hike, when the extra .2 has sucked all the oxygen from your lungs, let those people around you keep you going. in doing so, you'll help them too. i think that as we learn to do that we start to learn more about what it means to be in community with the God that loves us so deeply. i'll leave you with a picture of a place made for thinking way too deep about life.