campfirePeopleI clearly remember climbing the hill at Lakeview Baptist Encampment that evening of our last day of the church youth retreat. I was 16; it was the summer after my sophomore year.

I had spent a long weekend at camp with 30 or so high school kids from our church, my best friends. We gathered at the top of the hill, a camp fire was lit, we sat around and sang songs we all knew, and then we had a time of reflection, a time to talk about what we had learned, what we had been thinking, what we had experienced with each other.

During that time of thinking and talking, somehow the Bible study, the swimming, the meals together, the conversations we had, the trivial ones and the more important ones, seemed to come together into something that was bigger than the individual parts. We began to talk about those things and about each other. One person told the group how wrong he had been about his first impressions of another person in the group, and he apologized for how he had used those impressions as a reason for ignoring that person. One friend addressed another friend and expressed appreciation for the support during a difficult time she had just come through. Another friend apologized for holding onto a trivial grudge that had tainted their friendship, and we all knew what she was talking about. One young woman, Paula, spoke with wisdom far beyond her 17 years when she talked about the fire and the embers flying upward, and she made a beautiful analogy of our friendships and our faith. I still remember it. None of us knew that within that year Paula would die of an asthma attack.

I remember descending the hill in the dark with those same people. We spoke in muffled tones. We laughed and joked when someone tripped over a branch in the dark, but it was different. We were different. We had experienced something that had changed us all. The question was, would we maintain that difference once we got to the bottom of the hill? Could we maintain it once we were back home, back at school, back in our routines?

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the liturgical season of Lent. This past Sunday was what the church calls Transfiguration Sunday. It commemorates an event in the life of Jesus from which we get the phrase, “mountaintop experience,” those moments when our perceptions are altered, our minds are cleared, our hearts are opened, and our lives are changed, not unlike what I experienced at Lakeview Encampment.

Mountaintop experiences are wonderful. They are the moments we live for, the kinds of moments we put on our calendars and remember. Lent, however, is about the descent. Most of our lives are spent in the descent and in living on the flat plains of daily life. During this season of Lent I want to pay attention to the descent and to life on the plains. That is where life happens, where lessons are learned, where we exercise compassion even when we don’t feel it, and experience grace even when we don’t deserve it. My Lenten discipline will be to write about this descent frequently. Stay tuned.