This past week I hiked Blodgett Peak here in Colorado Springs. It was honestly the hardest hike I’ve ever accomplished. Going up was extremely steep, but going down was nearly impossible as it was not only steep, it also had a ton of loose rocks. I got stung by two bees and slipped and fell pretty hard several times coming back down. As always, even though it was incredibly strenuous and difficult, it was worth the views and opportunity to just be in nature and feel more connected with God.
On the way up the mountain, I was thinking back to last summer when I went on a road trip to Arizona with my cousins. That whole trip (really that season of life I was in) I was not in a good mental headspace. I was still at the beginning of my spiritual journey – I was heavily resisting God, and I had a lot of stuff going on in my personal life that just had me struggling and questioning everything. It was one of those seasons where I felt like I was drowning and no one around me had any idea that my head was about to sink beneath the surface.
There was one particular hike in Sedona we went on during that trip that felt like a turning moment for me. It wasn’t a particularly hard hike, but it was Arizona in the summer, so it was above 100 degrees the entire hike and I was struggling. I was hot, tired, and thirsty, but more than anything, I had a storm of thoughts attacking me in my head that had nothing to do with the hike. I remember by the halfway point where we stopped to eat our lunch, I couldn’t hold back my tears anymore – I was shaking and couldn’t stop crying. My cousin thought I had just overdone it and was overheated. She was trying to get me to take off my shirt and get some water to cool down, but I didn’t know how to explain to her that it felt like God had just shattered me into pieces.
That specific moment where I felt in my spirit that God had broken me has come back to me several times over the last year, and it came back to me again during my hike up Blodgett Peak. God loves me, and He had just spent the previous 9 months pursuing me and bringing me back to Him – it seems harsh and out of His character to break me like that. This time while I was thinking about it, I asked God: if that was Him in that moment, why would He break me like that when I was already on the edge? I immediately got this image of Lego pieces followed by God showing me that when we choose to build ourselves into something we aren’t, that God did not intend for us, the only way to build ourselves into the person He intended us to be is to break the pieces apart and start over.
Looking back, I think I had spent years building myself into someone I was never meant to be. A couple of years ago God brought me back to Him and showed me what it was to be loved and pursued by Him, but it got to the point where I was straddling two different lives. I knew which direction I wanted to go, but a part of me was still resisting. By the time I went on that trip to Arizona, I had chosen to pursue God, but I didn’t know where to go from there. As I climbed Blodgett Peak this week, I finally got an answer to my question I’ve had since that hike in Sedona last year. I realized that what felt like destruction in Sedona may have actually been the beginning of restoration. God wasn’t breaking me for the sake of breaking me. He was dismantling the version of myself I had spent years constructing so He could rebuild me into the person He had always intended me to be. That moment in Sedona wasn’t God breaking me, He was taking apart the pieces so I could rebuild.
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