I cannot believe Spring Break has already come and gone. Last Saturday at 4am (yes, that would be 4 in the morning), I was getting into a van with ten other people about to embark on a wonderful adventure in Moab, Utah. I spent my entire Spring Break week on a backpacking trip with Outdoor Adventures, an organization here at APU. We camped along the Colorado River for the first two nights and hiked through the beautiful Arches National Park, seeing the famous Delicate Arch and Landscape Arch while there. I also saw the Grand Canyon and Rocky Mountains for the first time. For the next five days we backpacked through Canyonlands National Park. We covered approximately 28 miles in those five days, all while each carrying close to 50 pounds of extra weight on our backs. It was challenging, but so completely worth it. The land contained a type of beauty I had never seen before. It looked like we had traveled back many centuries and stepped into prehistoric times. I was in complete awe of what was before me.
Though our time in the back country was challenging, it was also a time of great encouragement for me. The night before I left for the trip I found out I had been accepted into the LA Term study abroad program. I cannot express to you how excited I was about that. But more about that in another post. I also brought Shane Claiborne's book "The Irresistible Revolution" on the trip with me and was reading it a lot during the free time we had out there. It is such a challenging book to read. It makes me feel so uncomfortable, not that this is a bad thing. Thoughts about wealth, comfort, the suffering, the poor, Jesus' commands, and change swirled around in my head every night. When Jesus says to sell all you have and give to the poor, what does that mean? Am I supposed to take that literally? How far does that go? And even if I knew that He whole-heartedly meant it, could I do it? Would I do it? What would my life look like if I took half the things Jesus said seriously? These thoughts are still being tossed back and forth in my mind, trying to find some relief and answers.
Despite all these challenging thoughts, I found a great deal of encouragement through the many times I saw God throughout this trip: in the beautiful scenery, in the celebration of getting into LA Term, in the deliberations and longing in my heart for truth and understanding, in the laughs of the wonderful people in the group. I could not have possibly asked for a better group of people to go on this trip with. I love being around people, and this trip only further reminded me of that. We had so much fun together and laughed at such strange and wonderful things.
On a side note, something interesting I noticed on this trip was how quickly you adapt to life in the wilderness once you are put in the situation. When you hear about not taking a shower for a week, having no bathrooms, sleeping on the ground, and eating strange foods, many think there is no way you could happily do that. It is surprisingly not that hard. Sleeping on the ground becomes possible because you are so exhausted from hiking all day. Using the bathroom in the wilderness and not wearing makeup or taking showers seems somewhat more normal when everyone is doing it. And you pretty quickly adapt to the eating conditions. Dirt gets in your food and you eat it anyway (in fact, you use dirt to scrub out your dishes afterwards). You realize that 90% of the foods you are eating probably has trans fats or msg in it and you suddenly don't really care (or maybe you didn't care to begin with). And suddenly, "spam melts" for dinner sounds like a delicacy. Strange.
Overall, the trip was amazing. I would do it again in a heartbeat. Spring Break went by all too fast, and despite how happy I was to take a warm shower and sleep in an actual bed, I was genuinely sad when the trip ended and we were back at APU. The hardest part was leaving the other wonderful people I had grown to know and love over the past week. Even though I see them around campus (and oh, how it brightens my day), I will still miss being stranded out in the wilderness with them and laughing with them around campfires. I am so thankful that I was willing to step out of my comfort zone and have a part in this wonderful experience.
