Climbing Mountains

Our youth group has been "climbing mountains" lately.  There have been some very difficult changes and issues going on this year.  A large part of our Zanglais retreat was focused on processing all of these things together.

On the retreat, we decided to climb a mountain.

Halfway up the mountain, we stopped and sat down to listen to Dan and Kathleen speak.  They spoke about running the race to the finish, pushing through when things are hard, and enduring.

After their talk, we gave the youth the option of hiking the rest of the way up the mountain or going back down to the beach.  Surprisingly, out of 40 youth, only eight went down to the beach while the rest hiked to the top.

It was both difficult and beautiful to hike up the natural path created by rainwater.  The view at the top was probably one of the most spectacular that I've seen.

I could see in the kids faces that physically conquering the mountain gave them hope for the future of our youth group.