Wisdom Chaser E-Book

Nathan Foster

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 217

Beschreibung

It began with a simple question:"One day I found myself asking my father, across the chasm between us, 'Hey Dad, you want to climb the highest mountain in Colorado?'"And for Nathan Foster and his father, Richard, that simple question changed everything. With no hiking experience to draw on, they embarked on a journey of physical challenge, discovering just how far they could push themselves. For Nathan a parallel journey took him inside himself.Having grown up in the shadow of a famous father, Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline, Nathan had a lot of questions about who his father really was. Would hiking open the door for him to get to know this distant figure?As the one-time experiment evolved into a decade of challenging hikes up Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks, the Fourteeners, Nathan navigated his twenties—finishing college, choosing a career, a possible cross-country move, the early years of marriage and a major personal crisis. Along the way he would discover exactly what his father could offer him.This book also includes an afterword by Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline and coauthor of Longing for God.

Leseprobe

Wisdom Chaser

Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet

Nathan Foster

Afterword by Richard J. Foster

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com E-mail: [email protected]

©2010 by Nathan Foster

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Design: Cindy Kiple Images: Mt. Rainier: Philip Kramer/Getty Images

To Christy,the depth of your beauty seems to know no bounds.

Contents

1 It Never Hurts to Ask

2 The Beating on Mount Elbert

3 The Quandary of Dreaming

4 Finding My Pace on Mount Quandary

5 Time: Love’s Allegory

6 Freedom to Fail

7 A Much-Loved Nothing

8 Humility Is for Losers

9 On False Summits

10 Freedom to Question

11 How Do You Celebrate Discipline?

12 Living in the Moment on Longs Peak

13 Sometimes the Dragons Win

14 Accepting Things I Cannot Change

15 Rising and Falling to Assumptions

16 What’s in a Name? (The Tale of Skippy and Pete)

17 Choices on the Continental Divide

18 Electric Air on Holy Cross

19 Beauty Beyond Imagination

20 Walking Each Other Home

Afterword: Lessons from the Final Fourteener

Acknowledgments

1 It Never Hurts to Ask

My father loves the old adage “It never hurts to ask!” While I was growing up, he would often use the phrase with great enthusiasm—usually because he wasn’t the one doing the asking.

The truth is that sometimes it does hurt to ask. In fourth grade I asked Krista Johnson to be my girlfriend, and she laughed in my face. In fifth grade, when I tried to kiss Becky Randall, she slapped me.

A few childhood experiences were all it took for me to lose my youthful candor. I learned my place in the world. I learned how to avoid the pain and hurt of rejection. I learned to stop asking.

But what does it cost us not to ask? Those consequences can be far worse. So one day I asked my father: “Hey Dad, you want to climb the highest mountain in Colorado?”

That simple question changed everything. Little did I know that attempting such a feat would be the easiest part of our journey.

In my mind, the question held only the risk involved in scaling a peak over fourteen thousand feet high, nearly three miles up in the air. Colorado has fifty-four such peaks, the most challenging and threatening summits in a state full of mountains. Every year, numerous people die on them, and even more are airlifted out. Search-and-rescue personnel stay busy in Colorado. In any given week they track people suffering from hypothermia or dehydration, people who have been hit by lightning or buried by avalanches, people who have fallen off mountainsides or who are just plain lost. Open any book on hiking in Colorado and you will encounter a series of standard warnings about sudden climate changes, dangerous afternoon storms, rock slides, bears, mountain lions, altitude sickness and even the potential danger of wearing cotton.

Coloradans are accustomed to news coverage about lost hikers and avalanche victims. But these stories were morbidly fascinating for a boy from Kansas, and perhaps a bit disheartening for his father. Maybe that was why he laughed in my face when I asked my question with such naive confidence.

“Yeah, right!” he bellowed out in great laughter. “We can’t do that!” But I saw a twinge of interest in his eyes. My dad is forever the great dreaming pessimist, one of the many paradoxes about him that I have never understood. He was prepared to amuse his reckless son.

“No, Dad, I think we can,” I countered. “I’ve got this book here.” I held up Dawson’s Guide to Colorado’s Fourteeners, Volume 1. “Look; it’s the complete mountaineering guide to Colorado’s high peaks.” The cover featured a photo of a weathered man standing on the edge of a snow-speckled cliff. My father did not share my recklessness, but both of us had a tendency to go after things that seemed just out of reach.

From time to time I got strange ideas about things I wanted to do, and I was stubborn about doing them whether they were feasible or not. In grade school I read a magazine ad about building a one-person helicopter from household appliances. I spent many a sleepless night fantasizing about parking my helicopter at the school bike rack.

In high school I read a book on how to live in the woods on pennies a day. For months I planned my Alaskan escape. I glued pictures of one-person forts inside of notebooks, and I dreamed of being a hermit, complete with creepy beard. This was my answer to failing grades and refusal to wear a tie.

I once decided that an old computer monitor would make a great fish tank. Inside the monitor I found a small tube with a note to call Poison Control if punctured. Who would have guessed that my experiment would result in a fire truck with lights and sirens blazing being sent to my house in the middle of the night? And that the truck would unload people encased in neon yellow toxic waste gear who would wave little beeping wands all around my garage? Or that my curious and confused neighbors would run outside in their robes and pajamas? By this time the firefighters knew me by name; this wasn’t their first visit.

Some of my other plans were more viable, for better or worse. For example, my dream of living in a campground year-round actually came true—well, until my mouse-infested, Hantavirus death trap of a travel trailer ran out of heat in the dead of winter and my water froze while I was sick and vomiting everywhere with no phone in sight. This was my first near-death experience and the beginning of a major mouse phobia.

Family has a way of remembering these kinds of things. Dad was well acquainted with my history of grand plans, so I was careful when I approached him with the mountain-climbing idea. I made sure my mom and my wife were within earshot when I asked, because I knew their pessimism would only heighten his interest. My father tends to be level-headed and to play it safe, a tendency my mother is glad to reinforce. But I figured that the adventurer within him was longing for an opportunity to be set free. This could be his moment.

When I made my pitch, my mother shook her head on cue and my wife rolled her eyes. My father bit. We sat down at the kitchen table together—a twenty-two-year-old, two-pack-a-day smoker and his aging, out-of-shape father—paging through my new mountaineering guide. We both dared to ask: together, could we embark on an athletic feat of such magnitude?

My father’s experience with seeking what was beyond his reach had origins in his background of being orphaned, and consequently poverty stricken, in his late teens. Soon after multiple sclerosis ravaged his mother’s health, his father died from emphysema. Dad’s older brother was forced to take on the role of parent. Because they had no financial means to provide their mother with full-time medical care, the only way she could receive the help she needed was by admittance to a state-run mental institution, where she lived out the remainder of her days.

The summer of my father’s high school graduation, he went on a mission trip, sponsored by a local Friends church, to help build a school for Native Alaskans. The school would be the first high school north of the Arctic Circle. One night, during the long drive from southern California up the Pacific coast, the van pulled into a small Oregon town. The lodging that night was the gymnasium floor at George Fox College. As my father lay there contemplating his future, he began dreaming of going to school full-time. This was an expensive proposition, and one that seemed completely out of his reach. In an unspoken prayer, he dared to ask the question: Can I ever go to college? Can I ever go to this college?

The trip was a promising one for my father, planting the seeds of much of his future life’s work. But for now, the prospect of part-time night school at the local community college was all he could salvage of his dream. Full-time schooling was out of the question not only because of the expense but also because he was now expected to enter the labor force to ease the financial pressure on his older brother.

The first Friday after his return from Alaska, a local insurance company offered my dad a sales position. On Monday, he received news that a group of generous individuals was proposing to finance his college education. On Tuesday, with his brother’s approval, he turned down the insurance job. The following Friday he was hitching a ride to Newberg, Oregon, to attend George Fox College.

That was one of the most important turning points in my father’s life. It opened up new worlds to him, preparing him for the dreams he would continue to pursue in the years ahead. After all, he had learned that it never hurts to ask.

For the first two decades of my life, I didn’t really know my father. He was like a serious, silent ghost. My dad taught religion at a university, wrote books on spirituality and frequently spoke around the country. Occasionally I would accompany him to a place where he was speaking and observe strangers tearfully recounting how much his work had changed their life. My father didn’t even know their names, but they felt an incredible connection with him. I didn’t. The world seemed to know more of the man I grew up with than I did. I was the outsider.

Through the years, I grew fairly adept at keeping my distance from the whole family. My childhood was a jumble of emotions: guilt, fear, loneliness, longing and sometimes love. My dad was more like a mysterious icon than a full-fledged human being. When I was a kid, Dad would sometimes try to hug me. It made me so uncomfortable; I couldn’t stand being touched. In my teens, our relationship had grown silent and hostile. When my parents punished me, they sometimes gave me the consequence of spending time with him, which was always awkward. As I became a young adult, my father and I seemed to have no time or interest in getting to know each other. We had nothing in common. The social glue was missing.

The strain of our unresolved arguments, and silence when words should have been spoken, had taken their toll. The distractions of life numbed my hurt, which over time hardened into apathy. Instead of respecting family members, I learned to tolerate them. The little I knew about my father I didn’t much like. He and I learned how to be cordial with one another, and on occasion even managed to enjoy each other’s company. But we didn’t have any particular reason or opportunity to go beyond that. It would have been easy to drift into a pattern of visiting on the occasional holiday and calling a few times a year.

2 The Beating on Mount Elbert

Our mountain adventure was planned. At 14,333 feet, Mount Elbert is the highest peak in the state of Colorado. The eastern route is over eleven miles, ascending 4,833 feet. Dawson’s Guide indicated that the excursion would take nine hours round-trip. Although it sounds impressive, Elbert is actually one of Colorado’s easier fourteeners to scale, requiring nothing technical. Yet the thought of its sheer magnitude impressed us both. Our challenge was set.

All of the literature about climbing a mountain of this height insists that a summit must be completed before noon, since nearly every afternoon dangerous lightning storms descend upon the peaks. This mandates a very early start. I hate getting up early; my father rises with the sun like clockwork. After a great deal of debate, we decided on a 5:30 a.m. start.

We bickered a bit about what we should take. Dad deferred to me as the expert, since I had skimmed part of a book and was able to talk confidently about what little knowledge I had. This, you will recognize, is the common criteria for leadership in our culture. Our expedition was no different.

We had an array of different foods, emergency overnight gear, winter storm attire and as much water as we could cram into our cheaply constructed backpacks that were designed for middle-schoolers. Dad’s pack was blue with a neon “All Pro” patch proudly proclaiming his athleticism. Mine was black and not quite as embarrassing.

Then Dad got out his prized walking stick. Carved into its hilt was the image of an old man with a long beard blowing in the wind. It looked very cool—and horribly impractical. I pointed out that it probably weighed a good ten pounds, but Dad insisted on taking it. He would need it to fight off the bears, he said. This gave me free reign to pack a little luxury item myself. With much skill I secured a frothy bottle of Dr Pepper to the outside of my pack. I confess: I was an addict, and I enjoyed seeing my dad roar with hilarity at the ridiculousness of it.

My soda, his stick and our little-kid backpacks: we were set. On a cold June morning, two utter novices set out to brave the great unknown.

At the trailhead I rested against a tree in the dark, leisurely smoking a cigarette. I adopted the brave swagger of a veteran Air Force pilot before his greatest mission. My daydream was abruptly interrupted by my father’s burst of laughter and the sight of him struggling to maintain his balance after strapping on his pack. We had failed to consider what it would be like to carry these packs; they were too heavy and uncomfortable for a day’s journey. After discarding what we could—excluding the Dr Pepper and trusty walking stick—we ventured up the moonlit trail with a dawning realization of the torture ahead of us.

In some situations, all you can do is laugh—at least, all Dad could do was laugh, and occasionally comment on how he couldn’t believe I had talked him into this. It was probably the ridiculous nature of this endeavor that made him giddy. I was serious; there was work to be done, goals to achieve. But his laughter, as it would many times later, helped maintain a sense of lightness about the whole event.

Bird song announced the arrival of the morning sun. The forest seemed filled with wonder and excitement. Witnessing the altering landscape as our elevation increased summoned our latent anticipation. Climate changes at such altitudes are remarkable. In June, you can just as easily expect snow as blistering heat. That day it was all heat.

By midmorning we had reached timberline. Unprotected by the high alpine forest, we hiked in open sun, which bore down on us with great intensity. I could see the trail meandering up the hill and around the bend, up and up and up. The heat of the sun at this altitude was merciless. It dried up our words to the briefest of exchanges.

“This sucks,” I muttered to my father, gasping for air. He smiled and laughed a soft, strong laugh. Twenty steps later I continued my lament. “I don’t know if I can make it,” I said.

“Me neither,” he smiled.

We were beaten, badly. My head throbbed in unison with my rapidly beating heart. My legs ached like never before. I was dizzy from lack of oxygen. I felt truly miserable.

But as I looked back down the mountain, gauging our progress, a very odd thing happened: I fell in love with this kind of self-torture. Something about my wronged body suddenly began to feel right—the sensation was so raw and real. There we were in the thick of battle, two men fighting for every step. I had never felt this type of passion or intensity before. I was hooked. At the start, I don’t believe either of us had really expected to summit that day. But the more we hiked, the more our challenge presented itself, and the more determined we became.

At last we reached the summit. We filled the thin air with joyous, exhausted laughter. I felt like a warrior from the days of old.Leaning proudly against his weathered hiking stick, my father sat in awe at our accomplishment. I sat on my torn backpack, slowly savoring my spoils: a ninety-degree Dr Pepper that never tasted better. As I had expected, I was overcome by the majesty of sitting on top of the world. What I didn’t expect was to be moved by something much smaller. Vegetation on the top of a mountain of this height is a rare sight. At first glance, the mountainside looks rocky and dusty, but as I took a closer look, an ecological wonder unfolded. Nestled in the cracks of the rocks grew a miniature world of plant life. There were miniscule flowers everywhere, arrayed in purple, yellow and blue. How anything grows in such a harsh climate is beyond me. Equally stunning is how easily such beauty can be missed. I had been staring at the ground out of sheer exhaustion and had simply stumbled across this flora wonderland. What I didn’t notice was that a shift between father and son had begun.

From my vantage point at the start of our climb on that June day, far too early in the morning for humans to be awake, I had seen my father and me as polar opposites. As we worked our way up the hot and dusty trail, however, I began to see similarities between us. The harder the task, the more we both wanted it. Two things were clear: we were both badly out of shape, and we were both scrappy, stubborn fighters. I had known my own propensity to fight, but I had not known my father’s, and it greatly surprised me. This was the same man who would marvel at flowers all day long, the praying pacifist who wore gloves whenever there was work to do.

Somewhere in the haze of our strenuous activity, I remembered a day from the past. After not being allowed to attend my best friend’s birthday party, I had thrown the biggest fit of my life. I remember standing on my bed, screaming at Dad. He countered me, doing the stern father thing, and we went back and forth, fighting for power. Then my father did the strangest thing: he knelt down and closed his eyes. This act enraged me all the more. I demanded that he get up and fight me, but his only posture was silence. What was he doing? Was he being weak? Shutting me out? I didn’t understand it, but eventually it stopped the fight.

That event had left me feeling two distinct things: ashamed for the way I had behaved and deeply moved by my dad’s action. That day on the side of the windy mountain, I was moved by him once again. I looked over at him and noticed the sweat pouring from his brow, the shaking of his calves from the strain. He was a fighter. I saw strength in my father, and it was beautiful.

Now I dared to ask myself the question: Have I been wrong about who my father is?

The irony of climbing a fourteener is that just when you are celebrating the accomplishment of having made it to the top, you have to turn around and go back down the way you came. This can be a cruel and methodical process. The trip down is much easier cardiovascularly, but physically it held a new set of challenges. My legs, weak from the journey, often buckled as I pounded out thousands of steps.

As we reversed direction to return to the trailhead, I began to think about what was facing me after this triumphant climb. I was returning to a lot of uncertainty. My twenty-two years of life as a relative failure haunted me. It seemed that I failed at everything I tried, the most notable being school. After dropping out of high school, I had served brief stints of marginal ruin at four different colleges. Finally, after spending a week laboring over my one-page application essay, I had been accepted into Colorado State University and was planning to study social work in the coming months. Thank God for provisional admission status.

It is an understatement to say that I was feeling uncertain about my ability to succeed in college. More accurately, I was terrified. I was motivated by the horror of a thousand countless hours of mind-numbing labor in crappy jobs I had endured. I had to do this. There was an unfulfilled longing boiling up in me from deep inside, and it refused to be ignored. I had to do this.

Could my internal churning possibly be what my dad had felt at the prospect of ignoring his dreams and instead working in insurance for the rest of his life? At fourteen thousand feet, the distance between two poles has a funny way of shrinking.

Descending Mount Elbert, I could hardly believe that in just two months I would once again be facing my own personal insurmountable peak: college. I was headed back to a painful, failure-ridden environment. I was being given another chance, but I assumed that it would be my last. What would I make of it?

Questions danced in my tired mind. Exhilarated by our success on Mount Elbert, I began voicing them to myself: Can I actually finish college? Can I quit smoking? Can I stay sober? Can I become someone? Can I get to know the old man with the walking stick?

During that long trek down, on one of the proudest days of my life, I began dreaming of things that had previously seemed out of reach. My father’s words echoed in my head: It never hurts to ask.

3 The Quandary of Dreaming

Dreaming is a gift few people possess. Well-intentioned teachers and parents will caution children to get their heads out of the clouds (never mind the fact that we are made in the image of the ultimate Creator). Once we work the creative dreams out of our children, we send them into a world ready to sell them shallow, socially acceptable dreams—three easy payments and thirty days to riches, relationships or rock-solid abs.

Dreaming was easy for me, probably due to my rebellious nature. Our success on Mount Elbert lit a deep fervor for mountain exploration. I spent the following winter dreaming of the next summer’s mountain excursions, purchasing books and maps and selecting hiking gear. I pursued the hiking of fourteeners with the passion of an addict. Dreaming required very little mental and emotional risk; the real question was whether I could learn to follow through and actually do the work.

I have been wounded enough to understand the complex process of verbalizing one’s dream. Our world is chock-full of individuals who have dreamed and failed. Worse yet are the people who have beaten fate to the punch and never even allowed themselves to hope. I’ve met many people who sell the secret excuses and lies they tell themselves. You can feel the passive stabs behind their practical advice: “I could never do anything like that.” “You just have to know the right people.” “It’s so competitive out there.” What they are all subconsciously saying is, “I can’t be anything more, and so certainly you can’t either. Won’t you please validate my fear of failure?” Failure leeches can come in handy, of course; spite has motivated me many times.

Encouragement, however, is a far greater motivator. My wife is one of those people who will confidently tell me I am capable of doing things I would not otherwise consider. Her encouragement remains a significant driving force behind everything I have attempted to do. This type of optimism can work against me, of course, when it comes to cleaning the kitchen.

I learned as a small child that I needed to take great caution before broaching an idea or plan with my father. He was a far cry from a failure leech, but his pessimism could make him an unsettling person to talk to. Timing and mood were of utmost importance.

Dad was in the habit of being horribly practical—always rooting for the underdog yet holding fast to the improbability of victory. I must have learned this practice from him, because I do the same, except I tend to believe the least favored competitor can actually win. My father, on the other hand, will remain pessimistic until the very end. Dad will actually roll on the floor laughing in surprise when an underdog team pulls off a victory. His antics have even resulted in a foot injury that required surgery years later. Some men have bad knees from playing football; my dad has a chronic spectator sprain.