Coming Alive

I have asked many others and now I will ask you...What makes you come alive? I believe it is one of the most important questions in life. It is deeply rooted in the soil of who God made us; it is an imprint that we can choose to trace the lines of or simply ignore them- but it is still there even when it is ignored. It's the thing that makes you pop out of bed in the morning before sunrise, the thing that keeps your heart pumping deep into the night when everyone else is in bed, and the thing that you wish you could get paid to do it but you'd do it for free. I love the outdoors. I love climbing rocks, hard routes up rocks. I love falling asleep looking at the stars. I love the idea of unmapped terrain, unclimbed mountains, and fish that have never seen an artificial fly. The wilderness seems like a kind of home for me and getting there is a passion of mine, but I don't know where it came from. Growing up as a young chap next to the Shenandoah mountains in Virginia I used to look up at them every day and long to explore them. Rarely did my family go for an outing in the mountains. The creek in the ditch behind our house became my terrain to explore. I remember one of my favorite birthdays near the Smoky Mountains. We were on vacation and my parents said I could choose what I wanted to do that day. Pull my net out and catch fish and crawdads...of course. So all day I waded in the stream as my parents and brother were bored out of their minds. It was my favorite birthday party. This weekend a friend and I had the chance to go camping with some friends and take people rock climbing that had never had the chance. It makes me tick, helping them overcome their fear and experience victory, watching them look up a hundred feet one minute and look down a hundred feet just ten minutes later. There are few things I love more and few things that bring me more joy than watching their faces at the top and hearing their hollars. What makes you tick? Go do it...