The weirdest thing happened to me before we went to the mountains. I was boiling potatoes to make potato salad. While draining the potatoes, boiling water splashed into my eye. Searing pain shot to my brain. I thought I’d blinded myself. I spent twenty minutes rinsing out my eye with cold water, praying that I hadn’t burnt my eyeball out of my head. A half hour later, I called my aunt who was an emergency room nurse for years. “I got boiling water in my eye,” I told her.

“In all my years at the hospital, I’ve never heard of boiling water in the eye before,” she said with concern. “Maybe you should go to urgent care.”

It was eight o’clock at night. I’d just mowed the lawn and packed for our camping trip. Scott was at football practice with Joey. John was working a farmer’s market with his sisters. The last thing I wanted to do was take our two youngest boys to urgent care with me. Plus I wasn’t sure I could drive. My eye hurt so bad I could hardly keep it open. Closing it hurt even worse.

“There’s probably nothing they can do about it,” I told my aunt. I’d been praying since the moment it happened. You are my healer! I’d cried to God. Please heal me, Lord! How will I ever write again if I can’t see out of my eye?

“How bad does it hurt?” My aunt asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. Child birth hurts really bad. “My eye just hurts,” I told her.

“Well, if you can’t sleep because of the pain, you need to go to the emergency room. Put an eye patch on it for now and let your eye rest.”

So I made myself an eye patch and finished making the potato salad. Making potato salad with one eye isn’t as easy as it sounds. Scott came home and stopped to stare at me when he walked through the door. “What happened to your eye?”

“You won’t believe it,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows and waited for me to explain.

“I got boiling water in my eye.”

When I explained how I’d done it, he said, “Only you could do that. I really don’t think that eye patch is going to help you.”

I removed the eye patch and took some Motrin pm and went to bed. The pain kept me awake. But the funniest thing occurred the next morning. Though my eye felt raw and hurt like crazy, I didn’t need my reading glasses to see the message on my phone from our son. “Mom, are you awake? I just got in another car accident. It wasn’t my fault,” Luke assured me. “I’m on my way home.”

It was seven in the morning. Luke was supposed to be at work. When he rolled down the driveway his car didn’t look that bad on the driver’s side. Scott and I rushed over to him. Blood was on Luke’s shirt. We hugged him. Our 18 year old son assured me he was fine. The blood was from a cut on his hand. His shoulder was bruised from his safety belt, but that was it. Scott walked over to the passenger side of the car and stood there in silence. I joined him and my heart skipped a beat. “I’m so glad you were alone,” I said. “If someone had been with you they could have been killed.”

“I wasn’t alone,” said Luke. “Josh is at the hospital. He has a cut on his head, but he’s okay.” Josh is Luke’s best friend and work partner.

My injured eye burned, but I could see really good that Luke’s car was totaled. Pieces of a telephone pole were imbedded in the passenger door. “A guy pulled right in front of me. I swerved and missed his truck, but hit the pole,” Luke explained.

I walked into the house shaken. This is Luke’s fourth car accident since he got his driver’s license several years ago. Scott spent the next hour on the phone with our insurance company while I packed for the cabin, thanking God that Luke and Josh were okay.

“I think I may have given myself laser eye surgery with that boiling water,” I told Scott when he got off the phone. “My eye hurts like crazy, but I can see better now than I have in years.”

“Only you,” Scott said again as we climbed in our old Suburban with our four younger boys. In the mountains, the boys immediately wanted to do everything: fish, boat, hike. I have never hiked with our younger boys because I’m always in camp with the baby. But our baby is five years old now and was ready to hike the mountain with his dad and brothers this year. “Come on mom,” the boys beseeched. “You never hike with us. Hike with us!”

I really didn’t want to hike, I just wanted to catch my breath for five minutes, but I couldn’t turn the boys down. I know this mountain doesn’t look very big in the picture, but believe me, it’s a pretty steep climb. Especially if you haven’t climbed it in years. Decades. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I climbed this mountain, maybe in my twenties, in my teens for sure.

I grew up climbing the mountain. It’s right across the meadow from our cabin. “Do you think your leg will be okay?” Our oldest daughter Cami asked with some anxiety. She was hiking with us. Three years ago, I had melanoma cancer removed from my leg. My leg still gets sore when I work the farmers markets. I was hesitant to attempt this hike with my family. I really didn’t know if my leg would hold up, plus I don’t like heights. The older I get, the more heights scare me. We’re talking what a cat acts like when you try to throw it in the water. All claws and hanging on for dear life. That’s me when it comes to high places.

But we are blessed at our cabin to have the Pacific Crest Trail run right across our mountain. The hike to the PCT isn’t bad. The trail itself is great. It’s the hike above the trail to the top of the mountain that scares me. Of course my husband and our daredevil kids always go to the top of the mountain. And they don’t go slow. They go fast.

This photo with four of our kids (Cruz refused to be in the picture) isn’t my “top of the mountain happy yoga pose.” This is me ready to crawl on my belly away from that cliff behind us because I’m scared to death up there. I literally crawled on my hands and knees up the last fifty feet or so of the mountain to make it to the top. My legs were shaking so badly I didn’t think I could keep walking.

The boys were jumping around me from rock to rock like mountain goats. I kept my eyes on the ground right in front of my face, placing my hands on only the firmest rocks as I climbed, doing my best not to scream at the boys because they were terrifying me. Praying a lot.

But I made it to the top of the mountain with my family. The view was grand. A little pain and suffering, scraped knees and hands, but I could see for miles up there on that mountain. My eye still hurt from the burn, but it worked like an eagle’s eye now. Had God healed me when I cried out to him after that boiling water sprayed into my eye? Or had the scalding water actually burned away something that had impaired my vision?

I don’t know, but standing at the top of that mountain, I felt so grateful to see better than I’ve seen in a long time. And so grateful to be alive. So grateful to have survived melanoma. Scott was standing there with me. See how I’m clinging to him in this photo? That deep blue lake in the background is where my grandparents built our cabin nearly fifty years ago. It’s where our dock is, where the boys canoe and swim and catch crawdads and pollywogs, where the wind picks up across the water and rushes through the pines in the afternoon.

By God’s grace, Scott and I hadn’t divorced fifteen years earlier. Instead we’d humbled ourselves and got saved. Then God gave us four more babies. Building that large family we’d always dreamed about. Now those four babies were on top of that mountain with us. The Lord gave me the strength and courage to meet this mountain.

He will give you the strength and courage to meet the mountains in your life, too.

After climbing the mountain, I water skied for the first time in probably a dozen years. I can’t even tell you how long it’s been since I put a ski on my feet, but this summer after our friend Chris died, my dad unearthed his ski boat from the barn. Over a decade of dust and mice turds and owl poop was on that boat, but Opa can fix anything, and he fixed his old ski boat and we took the boat to the cabin for the Fourth of July. But I didn’t ski on the Fourth.

Honestly, I didn’t think I’d ever water ski again. My leg has a five inch scar. Some of my calf muscle is missing. The lake water is too cold. It’s snow water. In less than two years, I’ll be fifty. I’m not skiing.” I told myself in July.

“Let’s all go swimming and then tubing,” the boys said as we hiked down the mountain last weekend.

“Mom doesn’t get in the water,” said one of the boys, kicking dust into my face in front of me on the trail. “Mom would never tube. She doesn’t even swim with us.”

“How about I ski for you,” I said, emboldened from conquering the mountain.

The boys literally quit walking to see if I was serious. “You don’t even like to get wet, how will you water ski?” Eight year old G2 asked in his sweet, wide-eyed way.

“I used to ski good when I was younger. Before I had you and your brothers.”

“But you don’t ski now. We’ve never seen you water ski. We hardly ever see you swim.”

My mind was racing with excuses now of how to get out of skiing after it flew out of my mouth like moths released from a forgotten closet of my heart. Would I even be able to get up on one ski like I used to?

“Are your really going to ski?” G2 asked with his blue eyes as big as pluots. During harvest season I compare everything to our pluots.

“Do you want me to ski?”

“YES!” all the boys cried in union.

So for the rest of the hike, I said my prayers. Please God help me ski for my sons. I really want to show the boys their mom can still water ski. 

Can I still water ski?

Down at the lake, I decided not to test how cold the water was. I didn’t want anything to change my mind. If I can still climb a mountain, certainly I can still ski in a mountain lake, I told myself.

I put on my bathing suit (it’s as old as our third grader and has only been worn a few times), my daughter’s cutoff jeans, and my son’s life vest. The ski is my dad’s old water ski. Over the Fourth of July, Opa showed us he could still ski and he’s 74 years old.

Certainly I can ski at 48, was the pep talk inside my head. My body doesn’t move like it used to, but by God’s grace, I skied around the lake on my first try.

“WOW! I can’t believe you’re really my mom!”John said with a big smile. G2 and Cruz’s eyes were wide and full of wonder. Joey was speechless. Our older kids clapped and cheered from the dock.

“Your mom is athletic,” said my son-in-law, Drew, driving the boat, pulling me around the lake with the utmost care. “Of course she can still ski!” Out there on the water we almost ran over a family of loons. Mountain loons always remind me of God’s faithfulness for a reason perhaps I will share some other time.

I didn’t pen this post to brag about my accomplishments this past weekend. I wrote it to challenge you to meet your mountains, too. Maybe you think you’re too young. Or too old. Or too broke. Or too scared. Or too busy. Or too ____ you fill in the blank.

At the cabin, all of our kids were there last weekend when I skied. Can I tell you this has become a mountain for me? Getting all our children together in one place. Our older kids work. They have lives. Jobs. Significant others. Getting all of them together is like herding chipmunks. Having all our kids on the dock even though there’s no longer water under it this time of year made me so happy. The wind whispered through the pines and gratitude whispered through my heart.

I still can’t believe these seven kids came out of my scrawny body. If you’re wondering who the eighth kid on the dock is– the pretty, dark-haired girl behind Luke– is his girlfriend, Alex. 

I would have never known I could still climb a mountain if I hadn’t tried. Since cancer many more mountains have come into my life. I’ve been through plenty of pain and suffering, but this pain and suffering has helped me to see life and love more clearly.

I know you have pain and suffering in your life too. I know mountains are looming in front of you. But you know what? God is looming in front of you too. A great and mighty God. A God who loves you so much He died for you.

With God you can meet any mountain.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains.
    From where does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
    the maker of heaven and earth.

Psalm 121:1-2.

This has always been one of my favorite Bible verses. But it wasn’t until just last week that I understood this verse correctly. One of the Bible study blogs I follow explained this verse in the context of which it was written so long ago. The Bible teacher said, “We think of the mountains as a place to enjoy nature and beauty, to have fun with our families, to vacation and camp in safety, but to Israel the mountains were full of their enemies, bad weather came from the mountains, all kinds of danger awaited them in the mountains, but their help came from the Lord.”

I pray that you will know your help comes from the Lord. With God you can meet your mountains. Never feeling too young. Or too old. Or too frightened. Or whatever it is you may be feeling that is stopping you from living life to the fullest.