What I hadn't realize, and what he challenged me on, was the burden that came with the mountaintop. He looked at the mountaintop as being a challenge, a standard he need to meet. Saved "from" he understood; saved "for" ...that was what he struggled to grasp and realize. He felt a burden to live up to what he saw as the exceeding expectations of the experience. I, on the other hand, struggled with the lack of a definable experience, of feeling somehow that the plebeian, pedestrian path I plodded along lacked purpose, promise, portent...and passion.
Two different events. Two different vantagepoints. Yet both of us struggling with our self-imposed expectations and inadequacies. What we know, and yet still need to know, experience and embrace, is the unconditional love of God who loves each of us no less than he loves Himself, for He gave Himself for us.
We both struggle with where our lives are, and how those lives are so, so different from what we wanted and expected from our faith. He, struggling for his very life itself in the face of a relentless onslaught of cancer, when he fully expected to use his life to reach to others (and had already started doing so). Me, a life unalterably changed by divorce where I lost family and future in one swoop, leaving me to face a life alone and unloved on earth.
In the last couple of days, I have wondered if God gave my friend the mountaintop because He knew he would need it. That in facing death at such an early age, and so new in faith, he was given a passion, a depth of that experience to draw on that others wouldn't need.
Neither of us dreamed this would be what our Christian experience would be.
