My Heart Thawed In The Snowy Mountains

My heart began to thaw in the snowy mountains of North Carolina.

Have you ever felt like your heart was iced over? It happens when we get into rhythms of uninterrupted hurry. It happens when the overly-stimulated modern life crowds out quiet solitude with God. It happens when we neglect a basic principle in the Christian life: rest.

When I say rest in this sense, I don’t mean more sleep. What I mean by rest is the removal of certain things in your life that give you the ability to slow down and connect with God. The feeling is a bit like being on a plane. I love flying because for a few hours it’s just you and your thoughts and God. There’s nothing you can do to hurry the process. You are just there, at the mercy of the present and you can’t do a thing about it. It is freeing. That’s what I felt up in those mountains.

When we don’t give ourselves over to this type of rest, the heart begins to ice over. This doesn’t happen overnight, it is a slow process that compounds over months and years of neglect.

Implications

What are the implications of the heart icing over? For me, I feel my emotional life constricting. It’s hard to find joy in certain things. My internal warmth that I hope others receive grows dim. My ability to divorce my value from my work becomes increasingly difficult. And most importantly, my fellowship with God grows shallow.

This all happens when we neglect to practice what God created for us to flourish. It’s so easy to neglect rest in our fast-paced world, is it not? The daily pressures, notifications, responsibilities, metrics, newsfeeds, family issues, temptations, interruptions, disappointments… it builds up.

It’s almost like God knows this and created something for us to build into our lives to help us be renewed. A pressure-valve of sorts for the soul.

The retreat of the mountains

Contrast the difference between the constant bombardment of pressures in your life with the retreat of a snowy mountain cabin with no internet or cell service. It was as good as it sounds. Some friends and I had traveled north for a weekend vacation. A snowstorm met us and we were forced to stay longer than we anticipated.

When I was in the mountains I woke up every morning around 8am, only one other person was up. I’d leave my phone in the room because I didn’t have service and I’d make a cup of coffee. They had a big open window that viewed the surrounding ridges and most mornings it was overcast and snowy. The tracks from the previous day were gone. You could see the sun peaking over the trees behind the clouds. The world was resetting.

I’d sit down with my cup of coffee, my bible, and a journal. And for about an hour it was just me, the snow, and God. I had nowhere to be. I had no distractions. It was quiet. Not only in volume, but in internal pressure. I didn’t have to be anything or accomplish anything. I just enjoyed God’s presence and his creation.

One morning I went on a walk to check out the road conditions and a neighbors dog, Doug, walked beside me. He’d periodically stop and look around for a squirrel, then catch up with me.

God met me out on that walk. I didn’t see Him. There was no magical footsteps in the snow beside me. But I was mindful of His presence. I was reminded that this was life. The world is working very hard to get us to buy into the trap that life is productivity. Life is busyness. Life is achievement. Life is comparing success to those around us. But out in those mountains it all looks a bit different. More simple.

I thought a lot about my past job of being a hospital chaplain out on that walk. Out of all the people I’ve seen die, they all wanted one thing in their last moments. People who were meaningful to them to be near. They talked about memories of family dinners and trips with their grandkids. They talked about their stories of getting ice cream with their husband or the time their kid ran away and came back home. They told me stories that elicited peace and meaning for them, they never were about the many things we spend our lives chasing after.

There’s nothing wrong with being driven, I hope I am driven towards accomplishing my goals. We cannot live on the mountain of rest forever, we were made to come back down and work. The place of rest offers us something we desperately need from time to time though. Perspective. I think it’s interesting that Jesus, who faced more pressure than any of us realize, would build the rhythm of going onto the mountain alone to escape the crowds. If he needed it, how much more us?

My heart began to thaw in those snowy mountains. I hope you find places of retreat and that you build rhythms into your life that allow you the same blessing. I think it is just called rest.

Learning to work hard and rest,

Josh.