9
Ants and Other Holy Thoughts
I took my first breath in between the rocks, painted deserts, and rugged mountains of New Mexico. It was November 17, 1980, at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Albuquerque. If ever a place has owned me, New Mexico has—I can’t get enough of it.
Orange-and-pink sunsets burn golden edges on the horizon. They are the canvases on which God proclaims most deeply to me that He is holy and kind. Majesty is laid bare in every corner of the state; it doesn’t take much effort to see why they call it the Land of Enchantment. Enchantment is everywhere. In unassuming cliff dwellings and pine trees needling through the clouds, white sand as far as the eye can see, and winding mountain roads. Rainstorms blow in, and from a distance it looks like all of heaven has opened up to pour out dancing streams of water onto thirsty ground. I’m convinced it’s one of the most sacred places in the world, and that is why I return to New Mexico year after year.
For years I had wanted to hike a mountain outside of Santa Fe called Baldy. I’m not a hiker and I’m not in the kind of physical shape that I want to be in. I don’t own good hiking boots or even a decent water bottle. I hate bugs, dirt, and all forms of discomfort. I get dizzy at high altitudes and I have an absolutely terrible propensity to quit anything I am doing if I get even the slightest stomach cramp. I guess you could say I’m not hiking material.
Still, I felt I should hike this mountain that lies on the outer edge of a camp that I have been going to my whole life. Everyone always talks about hiking Baldy and how beautiful it is at the top. It’s sort of a badge of honor to hike the trail; a way of identifying yourself as a true alumnus of the camp. So with fear and trepidation, I decided to take the plunge and earn the merit badge.
I went on the hike with two goals in mind: staying alive and walking away with a good story—preferably some deep revelation about God and hard work and earning merit badges and being on the mountaintops of life.
This particular summer, my enthusiastic, athletic, gorgeous friend Chelsie was at camp with me and agreed to make the hike. With water bottles and little else in tow, we set off one morning on the seven-mile trek. My eyes were wide open. Looking for the story. Or bugs. Waiting for a moment of deep truth to hit me. Or for a leg cramp to give me an excuse to quit. Past trees that shot up hundreds of feet in the air, critter holes, boulders, and infinity edges that gave you a view of the beautiful forever, we trudged. Sometimes talking. Sometimes just trying to breathe.
We were surrounded by hundreds of trees. Thin air and mountains on every side of us. When we finally stopped in a clearing to catch our breath, we couldn’t see the camp anymore. At an earlier point we’d seen it, seemingly thousands of miles behind us looking like a tiny dot, but now it was nowhere in sight. Neither was the edge of the mountain or the beautiful New Mexico forever.
We were somewhere deep in between. Tangled up in trees that towered over us on every side, climbing high in front of us and behind us. It was shaded, darker, and there was a chill rushing down the mountain.
Chelsie stood, hands on her hips, looking all around us as if she were studying our exact location, drawing a picture of it in her head. I sat down on a dead tree branch to drink the last of the water and was promptly attacked by red ants the size of beetles. I bemoaned the number of ants in the world, shocked that they were thriving at such high altitudes.
“How many ants do you think there are in this world?” I whined. “I mean, really, do they have to be on mountains too? Ugh! I hate ants.” I brushed the ants off and picked up sticks so that I could attack them.
Chelsie, eyes still studying the trees above us, spoke as if she had not heard a word I said. “You know, Jen, even if we were to get lost up here, not visible to any helicopter or search team, just lost somewhere like a speck in the midst of a million trees, we would not be lost to God. God would know exactly where we are. That’s amazing. He could find us. You know, He could find us out here. He can pinpoint us right now. He is the only one who knows.”
I had climbed this mountain all morning, hoping for some sort of spiritual revelation like this, and all I walked away with was a deep worry that ants are taking over the world.
While I spent my time reasoning that for every tree on that mountain there were probably a hundred thousand million ants, she was walking around thinking holy thoughts. I was cursing ants and she was realizing that from where we stand, in the midst of a million trees, the human eye cannot see us, but God can still see us. Only God can see us. We didn’t have enough water or time to make it to the top of the mountain. So we sat a bit longer in the clearing and then started our journey down.
Exactly one year later, with a new hiking partner, better shoes, and a more fit body, I found myself attempting to hike to the top of the mountain again. This time I wanted to make it to the top. To the tippy-top of the tippy-top, seven miles up. We were determined. We started at 7,000 feet and we would end at 11,000 feet. We would end at 11,000 feet. We would end at 11,000 feet. We would end at . . .
Maybe just 9,000 feet? Nine thousand feet would be good enough, wouldn’t it? My bandmate Richard and I took turns quitting on each other. He wanted to stop and go back down but I charged ahead. Then I wanted to stop. I whined and complained and cried tears of pathetic failure. “But we are so close. We’re like, almost practically there,” he said.
But this was a complete lie. Neither of us knew how much longer we actually had, because neither of us knew where we were. Or when we left. Or how far we had already traveled. We’d set out on the hike the way a kid sets out to find Santa Claus in the woods behind their backyard, entirely naive and unprepared to hike to the North Pole.
I needed food and water, real sustenance. That morning I’d skipped the cafeteria breakfast. Thirteen hundred other people had already been through the line. Twenty-six hundred hands digging serving spoons into silver pails of lumpy eggs, mixed with the overpowering smell of chlorine-mopped floors? I would quite honestly rather eat my big toe. So I had a banana and a piece of toast with honey. That was five hours before the hike.
What was I thinking? Mental torture ensued as my feet dragged me toward the top of a mountain I now despised. There weren’t enough calories in me for an ant to make it up and down a mountain. How could I have been so dumb? Would my dad or a park ranger find my body? Or would a GRIZZLY BEAR EAT MY DEAD BODY FIRST?
Richard and I both tried quitting on each other one more time. We quit on the mountain, on life, on the people joyfully passing us with their fancy REI water bottles, compasses, and hiking sticks. We hated them, as a matter of fact.
My ears were burning. Deep inside they just hurt. It was the wind and the altitude and the cold air and the deep, out-of-shape breathing that got my ears all burning and tingling inside. The pain went down the side of my neck and I felt it at the base of my head. My hair hurt and my fingernails felt brittle, like the wind was blowing through them.
Mostly though, it hurt to swallow. Not like a sore throat, but a dry throat. My mouth was dry. My throat was dry. As if deep crevasses had broken into the lining of my vocal cords, cracked wide by the desert sun, split open into parched tunnels. My spit was gone, and even trying to get spit from somewhere else hurt.
I was so frustrated at myself. Why didn’t I save my spit? I knew better than that. I knew to save my spit. If I learned anything in my childhood it was this: a smart kid saves their spit.
On long car rides, Dad would always say, “We’re not stopping for another hour, so if you’re thirsty you better start saving that spit!” On camping trips, we would hear the same thing. “We’re going to the top and once you run out of water in your bottle don’t ask to drink from your sister’s bottle. You better just save your spit.” Save your spit to make snowmen. Save your spit to drink later on in the car. Save your spit to clean your face off (that one I learned from my grandpa). The whole world had a thing about spit saving.
Why didn’t I listen to my dad? I didn’t even know how much longer I had. There were no mile markers. No trail signs. Just dense forest and pathways that led farther and farther up. I would have killed for spit.
The trees were hanging over us. My muscles burned. My stomach cramped. My feet felt like lead. And it wasn’t fun anymore. No rush. No mountain high. No spiritual revelations. No merit badges for sportsmanship or good work ethic or pure thoughts. My thoughts were sooo not pure. Richard and I weren’t talking anymore, just huffing and puffing. Why did I insist on doing this?
And that’s when I heard His voice.
Like the trees were whispering, His Spirit descended on me, taking up my insides. Like all of Narnia was coming out from under the spell of ice and breathing itself on me and in me. I heard an overwhelming voice on that mountain speak a profound truth into me.
It was overwhelmingly quiet and simple.
I thirst.
That was it. I thirst.
And it all started to make sense to me. Like a movie fast-forwarded to the end and then rewound and replayed, I saw the pieces of my faith come together, the story of Jesus playing out in front of my eyes.
The insult. The alcohol offered to a thirsty, dying man. The vinegar. The pain of being thirsty. The burning ears. The throat. Even the tips of His hair hurting. His gasping.
All of a sudden, on that mountain, I realized the cost of grace.
In the most unlikely moment, when I had given up on any spiritual revelations and conceded to death-by-grizzly-bear, I finally understood that I was not alone in my suffering, because Jesus had been thirsty too.
Lots of people have been thirsty. Have gone thirsty. Have died thirsty. But their thirst does not bring me strength, only guilt.
His thirst though? The Son of God’s thirst digs down deep into me and saves me. His grace came with a price: He thirsted. For the first time in my life, I understood the physical pain of being thirsty. And I felt a deep sadness.
I wish Jesus never had to feel thirsty.
At the tippy top of the tippy top of the mountain, the only mountain I have ever used my own legs to climb, I was surrounded by ants. And wind, other mountains, a million trees, the fear of bears, the dread of descent, and the piercing sound of utter silence. And I felt the kind of alone that feels independent at first. Then it just feels kind of lonely. Kind of scary. I was ready to go home and be done.
So this is what it feels like to be thirsty, I thought. Grace burned the back of my throat. To know what it feels like to be that kind of thirsty and that kind of lonely made Jesus seem a little more near, a little more real than He had ever seemed. I thought of my friend Chelsie and how she only had to walk a short while to realize the vastness of where we were and the way it could make us feel lost. She knew what it felt like to be lost, but she wasn’t afraid because she knew what I didn’t. Not only could God see us in our lostness, He could empathize.
She understood. We would be thirsty and might get lost. But that was okay, because Jesus was thirsty too. And that meant He knew how to find us.
I felt thirsty on the floor of that nursery in Las Vegas.
First, I called my dad.
“Dad,” I sobbed, “you gotta come get me. I’m in Vegas with no clothes.”
That is a call that every father dreams of getting from his little girl. It went over real well.
I had never felt so lonely in my life. My throat burned. I felt dizzy. My legs were shaky. I felt sick to my stomach on the floor of that room. Then I called my dear friend and pastor Jackie Roese1 and unleashed a torrent of emotion. I explained, through unintelligible sobs, that there was an explosion and we were okay, but our RV and everything we owned was gone. Burned up in a fire that had the entire highway shut down. I also told her that I was done. With ministry. With being faithful. With being sweet. With everything. I was done. And I needed to come home and cuss and drink and scream and quit and cry. There were so many tears I needed to cry. Could someone just come get me? I actually asked her that.
Just come scoop me off the floor, wrap me up in a blanket, hold me in your arms, put me in a bed somewhere, and nurse me back to life.
Jackie responded to me firmly, with her tender, authoritative New York accent. She held my hands over the phone.
“Listen to me. You gotta pull it together. You can do this. You lock eyes with Him, Jenny. No one else. No one else has you right now. Just Him. Just you and Jesus. Picture Him standing in front of you. Now look into His eyes, nowhere else—lock in. You can do this. Don’t look to the left or the right or up or down; just look Jesus in the eyes, Jenny.”
It was her voice and His eyes.
And the opening band went on stage. And the ladies in the greenroom cleaned up scraps from dinner. And my daughter played with our nanny. And my husband made calls to insurance companies and police officers. And the teenagers in the hallway laughed and ran around while my spirit crumbled and gave up in that little room two thousand miles away from home.
I had never been so thirsty.
I knew in that moment a complete brokenness that you can only experience by yourself. I was at the very end of my own capacity to survive. This was what it meant to be thirsty. It meant to be alone in the most severe of ways. My tears finally dried up. And I sat in silence on the phone. There was nothing left. But Jackie was still there, on the line. Still holding me together through the phone.
And that’s why I remember her voice and His eyes.
“Jenny,” Jackie said with a tenderness I can still feel, “this is an awesome place to be. An awesome place. This is the best night of your life. The best night.”
Her voice hung in the air. I was too weak to protest.
“This is the best night of your life because, Jenny, you are about to see God be God.”
And with eight words, my life was on the path to being reborn. I didn’t know it then, but she did. Because every good pastor knows that death leads to life.