One Way Out: Prayer

Yesterday was a great day. It was jampacked with things from when I woke up at 7am until I went to bed around 2am. The day started off normal - chapel, class, lunch with friends. Then, Amy, Betsy and I decided to go for an adventure. Now notice I don't say hike... but adventure. We were going to climb to some radio transmitters above the 14, but decided that it was too late in the day to begin such an obstacle as that. So, we found some hills/mountains that are near the school that we've always dreamed of hiking on. These geographic features are not part of a park, or have any trails. We would have to trailblaze up and down these mountains if we wanted to achieve our goal: reaching the top. We made it up the mountain without too much difficulty. A few scrapes here and there, some dirt in our shoes... nothing too eventful. Towards the top of the mountain we got stuck and had to hike down and hike up another ravine before we could reach the crest. We made it to the top of the mountain, and we got to look out all across the Santa Clarita Valley. Beatiful! Squished a bug and claimed the top for BAM and Hotchkiss.

Here's where the fun began...

We headed back down the mountain only to deadend at a cliff with a 30' drop. Now, hiking down to this deadend had been quite eventful in itself. We had slid down a steep hill for about 40', kept outselves from rolling down sandy areas by holding on to bushes. We truly felt like we were on an adventure deep in the brush of some other country. We were a little dissapointed to reach a deadend, but headed back up to the crest again. Headed down another ravine. This was crazy... fought our way through brush and trees. Clung for life to bushes to keep ourselves from sliding down 20'. I slipped over a small hill and fell about 6'... got a nice spanking on a rock. But, our spirits were still high.... until we reached another cliff. Another deadend. This dropoff was even bigger than the first. We had to hike back up to the crest, but we had skidded down such a steep embankment that it would be very difficult to get out. Betsy started to get upset and worried that we'd have to be helicoptered out... but the three of us sat down and prayed for a while. Almost immediately Amy found the trail we had come up on not far from where we were. We headed back down the mountain and made it down safely. We got to the bottom and praised the Lord together.

It was amazing to climb a mountain thinking we could conquer all things, and then come off the mountain praising the Lord and giving him glory for giving us strength and wisdom. Not the lesson we expected to learn yesterday.

After that Amy and I had a nice talk at In N Out (something we were craving on the hike). Went to a Ghetto party and played Old Maid (yea, kind of ironic). And then watched parts of Bourne Supremacy. Such a great day. We got to see the Lord give grace in ways we couldn't expect.