leaving things behind

so, i wrote this yesterday, sitting in a church in port alberni, after a day and a half of sledding and crazy fun and what not. so, i wrote like crazy for a couple hours. so, in a couple days i'm going to sit down and re-read this over a cup of french pressed sumatra, and write an inspired article of some kind. we'll see.
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its been a crazy fun weekend so far. a weekend of chucking things at kids while trying to pronounce well thought out (well, not really) one-liners with my cheesy youth leader voice. which kind of sounds like ron burgendy meets oscar the grouch... if you can picture that.

so yesterday we drove halfway up this small mountain, parked our vans and cars and started walking up this icy, somewhat stiff snow. the majority of the mass of white covering the ground was partially frozen ice, with a thin layer of powder covering. we sledded for a good two hours on this icy, rocky hill, which consisted of me crashing into a pile of rocks, and playing with sticks.

after that we had a lunch of hot-dogs and noodles- and some chai tea that i snuck up in my crappy blue winter jacket.then a big group of us decided to scale the mountain a bit, walking on the logging road for about 45 minutes, halfway up the mountain.

from there i could see into the valley- a series of rolling hills covered in high evergreens. the fog rolled in a couple times, like a cloud moving across the sky, and clearing up again. while i was sledding down the hill i went off the edge of the road into a steep gorge, but i didn't slide down the huge hill. some trees broke my fall.

the few points when i wasn't doing super fast crazy carpet runs i was standing on the side of the road, looking into the valley at the clouds covering the lower parts of the trees, which extended into a giant mass of grey, which i interpreted as the ocean. i felt like i was on top of the world, like a traveler looking in awe at the progress i had made so far. so then i looked across the forest and i could see the very top of the mountain- masses of rock covered in snow, with black patched of cliff sticking out. i preferred not to think about how far it would take me to get to the top of the peaks... or how ridiculously painful the sled ride down would feel.

so after that we sledded back down. a 45 minute walk up turned into a 10 minute ride down. hitting the rocks on the way down really hurt.

i feel really dry right now... i won't lie. i'm not used to things being so quiet. i'm used to a ridiculous amount of traffic in my ear all the time, filling the void of quiet with a thousand thoughts per second to wrestle with. when i was lying on top of the mountain, by myself for about ten minutes, i came to a sudden realization that it was quiet- that there was no sound, not even of traffic from a highway a mile away. with my best attempts i could make out the sound of water flowing from a creek.

and i feel dry because i've been away from home too long. on one hand everything feels familiar here, on the island. i grew up here, so it makes sense that i'm used to how things work around here. i'm used to the fact that drivers drive slowly, that the forest is always a walk away, and that nobody seems to change. everything is in a constant flow of unchanging.

some day it feels like i'm trying to change the flow, to fit my new circumstances... only, its not that easy to change something that has been a certain way for a long time. people don't change... or they don't want to. and people don't want to do things differently. its not natural.

so i think any attempt at change we make has to be intentional. we can't change unless we want to. or, we can't change unless we are open to Christ.

the one thing i have learned from change so far is that it hurts. change requires us to break old habits, to leave things behind, or to change the constant flow of day to day life we find ourselves in.