I’m being honest here, right? I mean, I’m speaking the truth about the journey I’m on, good, bad, ugly, indifferent. Right? Well, I’m frustrated. After some positive movement, I feel like I’ve veered off the course. I haven’t been able to write and have allowed a host of excuses prevent me from posting lately. I haven’t been hearing from God. My blade is dull. My walk is at a stand still.

And what I’ve noticed about the walk, the journey, is that you aren’t moving across flat land. You are climbing a mountain. Momentum is important. Constant motion is important. When I say I’m at a stand still, that’s actually an overstatement. Once you lose steam, you lose ground. So if you aren’t making progress, if you aren’t moving forward, you are actually sliding backward. There is only drive or reverse. There is no neutral. There is no park. You are either marching closer to God or wandering farther from Him. That’s my point of view anyway.

The physics aren’t in my favor. It’s much easier just to roll down the side of a mountain than to dig in and climb. And the farther up the mountain I go, the harder it gets to maintain the climb, to reach the next level. But if I stop, if I fail to maintain momentum, the fall from there is much higher, must faster.

Of course, we all are going to lose steam at points in our journeys, lose ground, fall backward. The key is to recognize you are headed in reverse and recover lost ground as quickly as you can. If we think of being stuck or stagnant only as failure to move forward instead of actively moving backward, we probably won’t act with the same sense of urgency. I know I haven’t. Right now, again if I’m being honest, I’m going in reverse. And I fully recognize it. I’m trying to get things turned around quickly. It’s not the first time I’ve been here. Won’t be the last. My ongoing goal is to make it higher up the mountain each time, and when I fall, to fall a shorter distance. After all, no one’s journey can be depicted by a perfectly straight line. Instead, they look like stair steps and scribbles up and down. As if charting the stock market. Our walks are highly volatile.

I have a remarkably shallow pool of physics knowledge to wade in, but I do know that an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by a sum of physical forces. Right now, physical forces (me) AND natural forces (the mountain) are acting upon my motion.  The third law of gravity says for every action, there is a reaction. (And that, my friends, was the last splash of water in the pool.) So, it’s my turn again to react to my situation. I can either roll all the way down, or dig back in and claw. I choose to claw.