Tonight I was sitting in the closing service of Family Camp. For those of you who don’t know, family camp is basically a week long church camp for families in simple terms. My family has gone to this event generation after generation so it has just become a tradition for us to go every year. It’s truly so much more than just a church camp for the whole family but you have to actually go to Fairmount Wesleyan Campground to truly understand the significance. If you are ever in the central Indiana area during the end of July I highly encourage you to experience family camp even if it’s just for one night.
Tonight during the closing service the speaker/pastor Nathan Metz was telling a story about how he hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and explained the phenomenon of how if you spend enough time at the bottom of a canyon you begin to feel like the bottom is ground level. I knew exactly what he was talking about because I experienced that myself when I hiked Bryce Canyon. I remember the hike down was fairly quick, I didn’t even realize how far down I was going into the canyon.
When we had started our hike at ground level it was quite chilly but once we got down to the canyon we were shedding layers because it was so warm. I started to become comfortable in the bottom of the canyon and started to tell myself I didn’t want to come back out because I didn’t want to face the colder weather or the grueling hike out.
The bottom of Bryce Canyon became comfortable, a place I didn’t want to leave. When it was time to make our hike back up I truly did not think I was going to make it. That is still the hardest hikes I have experienced to date. My asthma with the elevation changes I was convinced was going to kill me and the temperature change also added a unique challenge. I remember I kept (semi) jokingly saying out loud “God take me now, I am not going to make it back out of this Canyon”. Everything in me wanted to just stop and set up camp in the bottom of that canyon, I did not feel I had the strength to come back up.
I started shifting my plea to ask God to just take me now and ended up praying for Him to give me strength to make it back to the surface. There were older couples, couples with kids etc that lapped me on my hike in and out of the canyon and I truly could not believe how fast they got down and back out.
Nathan’s story resulted in me reflecting on my own experience of that same phenomenon. His statement of “being in the bottom of the canyon begins to feel like ground level” really made me reflect on a few things. I stopped to think how we as humans allow rock bottom in life to become our ground level. How often do we let our anxiety, depression, addiction, feelings of being inadequate keep us in the bottom of the canyon? I stopped and asked myself if it is so hard for us to get out of that rock bottom, that bottom of that canyon because we stop seeing it as the bottom and see it solely as our ground level?
We accept those things as our baseline and as a result become content with those things controlling our lives. We develop such a skewed idea of ground level that we do not realize God is calling us to think outside the walls of the canyon. We are not meant to see the canyon walls as mountains but we allow ourselves to remain in our pity party in the bottom because we have altered our reality and think those walls are mountains that are there to protect us on ground level. The thing about canyon walls is that they are so large we become isolated, from friends, God and life in general.
So then I further sat there contemplating the idea of being in the bottom of a canyon and that being my new ground level. I wondered if accepting this new ground level is what results in us feeling empty? Has it caused us to have a broken relationship with God? Has living in the bottom of that canyon allowed our spirits to die? Have we become totally blind to even being in a place that we need to hike out of?
I then circled back to thinking about those who climbed down and out of that canyon at such a faster pace than myself. As I was trying to figure out why I kept thinking about that I felt God speak to me again. He reminded me that just like everyone hikes at different paces and difficulties we cannot compare our life journey to others. Some people come out of the bottom of their canyon faster than others, but it doesn’t make the slower process less of an accomplishment.
What matters is that we stop living in the comfort zone of pain, suffering and sin and choose to climb back out of the canyon. We choose to no longer accept the bottom as our new ground level. No matter how long that hike out takes us, the important thing is that we have taken our life back (with God’s help) and the victory is in coming back to the true ground level. Allowing us to come out of those canyon walls that have isolated us from everyone we love, the walls that isolate us from God and further separate us from what he desires for our lives, the same canyon walls that lie to us that all of these things that make up so many hardships in life are ground level.
We do not have to live a life full of constant pain and suffering. The bottom of the canyon we are living in does not need to be our new ground level. We can come back to the surface and start living a life on our true ground level. It’s not to say hardships won’t still happen in our life or that we won’t experience pain or suffering. What it means is that we are no longer accepting that as a permanent baseline, and that ground level is so much more beautiful than the delusion of the canyon we’ve learned to become comfortable in.
Taia Jo 