The Mountains Are Calling

RMNP Mountain Lake

So. My family just got back from a very long, very exciting vacation. I won't go into details, but at one point we went on a very treacherous mountain pass which dropped off on both sides (think Shasta in Horse and His Boy). The views on both sides were fantastic. Scrumptious. Incredible.

There was a visitor center at the top (probably so you could rest a while and uncurl your fingers from their tight grip around the steering wheel or, in the passenger's case, from the sides of one's seat. One of the popular shirts at said visitor center read, "The Mountains are calling and I must go." It was by some naturalist...one I could probably find quickly were I not too lazy to google it right now.

On the way back, I snapped this picture with my phone out the window (hence the lousy light and terrible resolution). It's a mountain lake I'd noticed on the way in-a small body of water half hidden by the craggy mountainside and the forest and snow around it. As soon as I caught sight of it, the story ideas began. What would it be like to hike up to that lake? What if there was a hidden city on the side of the mountain I couldn't see, beside the lake? How many people had traveled through that forest-what if knights had made the journey, being more technologically advanced than we believed them to be. Were there lakes like this in the UK-in Ireland and Scotland and all those other lovely places I've always wanted to visit? Did knights wander through there, eventually passing similar remote mountain lakes on their quests or adventures?

And then it hit me-the longing. I suddenly wanted more than anything to go see this lake, to go stand on the edge of that mountain and feel content because I'd reached this secret, mysterious place.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

In the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis uses the illustration of "the old Narnia" to remind us of how we feel about our own world. Once the old Narnia is destroyed, the survivors, Peter and Lucy and Edmund and so on, are heartbroken. Then they realize that the new place in which they find themselves is almost exactly same as the old Narnia, only different-deeper, more wonderful, more like the real thing. Jewel the Unicorn says, "The reason we have loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this."

Every longing we feel in this world is a blind grasping for something else, something we'll never find in this world no matter how hard we look. Y'know the hope you get when you squinch your eyes shut and dive into a wardrobe, desperately longing to plunge, not into the wooden back of the thing that ends up giving you some nasty splinters, but into a field of lamp-post lit snow? That longing isn't for Narnia. It's for somewhere else, really. Somewhere we belong.

Again, from Jewel: "I have come home at last. This is my real country. I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, but I never knew it till now."

Personally, I can't wait until that longing is fulfilled. And it will be. For the Kingdom is calling, and eventually, I must go.