Everybody, Always

Hershey bars. I was also looking for a bathroom. The guide shook his
head at me as I hopped off rocks and jumped over logs. Every few
minutes, he would say to me, “Bob. Pole, pole.” I asked what this meant.
In Swahili, “pole, pole” means “slowly, slowly.”
I can’t lie; for a guy who does everything fast, that’s hard advice to
receive and even harder advice to follow. By the end of the first day,
though, as I laid down in my tent, sore, beat up, and with every muscle on
fire, I knew why he’d been saying, “Pole, pole.” It’s hard to walk with
Jesus and run ahead of Him at the same time. Yet I’ve been doing that my
whole life. I’ve misunderstood going slow as lacking enthusiasm and
going fast as joy. I’ve confused patience as a lack of will and activity as
purpose.
What I learned from our guide is I could either run fast or get to the
top of the mountain. I couldn’t do both. We need to decide the same in
our faith. It’s easy to confuse busyness with progress and
accomplishments with pleasing Jesus. Every day we get to decide
whether we’re really following Jesus or treating Him like He’s just a
Sherpa carrying our stuff.
It took five days, but I made it to the top of Kilimanjaro. My first
thought at the summit was Where’s the air? as I grabbed my throat.
Brave little Charlie made it to 16 , 400 feet. This was to be his personal
summit. To give context, this was higher than the summit of Mount
Rainier in North America. That’s not bad for a four-foot-tall kid who had
just come through a big operation. Before Charlie headed back down the
mountain with one of the guides, we had a ceremony. I had brought
fifteen medals with me and started pinning them on Charlie’s jacket. I
said, “Charlie, you’re brave,” and pinned on the first medal. I said,
“Charlie, you’re courageous,” and pinned on the second one. Medal after
medal hung on his chest as I spoke words of truth and encouragement and
love over him. As I put the last medal on him, I said, “Charlie, you’re a
mountain climber!” and gave him a hug. He looked like Colin Powell
when he walked off that mountain.