Sometimes, all you can do is be thankful.
Last week I visited my friend and old coworker, Kristin, who took a leap with her husband last year and moved to the other side of the state. They had a 5 year plan but once they bought an idyllic home on the banks of the Entiat River it was less than a year that she quit her job and followed her husband over to live full-time.
There are a few trails that need new descriptions for Washington Trails Association that are on her road, so I headed over to hike them with her and explore the Entiat River Road Valley. I hadn’t spent much time there and it seemed like the perfect excuse!
After spending the night and relaxing alongside the river, we went for two hikes up the road, the Entiat River Trail and Silver Falls National Recreational Trail. I highly recommend both and you can read more about them in the links or by clicking on the pictures.
This area was devastated 3 years ago in the Wolverine wildfire which consumed over 65,000 acres and many homes and farms were lost. As we walked through the burn area of the Entiat River Trail, I couldn’t help but be struck by both damage and the beauty. How life had ended and yet begun again.
There was a particular moment when I glanced over to my left through a stand of blackened and perished pines to see a sliver of fluttering green. One lone verdant tree remained.
I couldn’t help but wonder at how this had happened. Why that tree? What were the circumstances that had permitted it to withstand the fire that had come through. It was deciduous, so the leaves were recent, but the trunk of the tree had survived when all of its neighbors had not.
This last Saturday, most of my family was out in the wilderness. I was scrambling up to Mount Ruth in the Mount Rainier National Park, my husband and one daughter were climbing Glacier Peak in the North Cascades and the other daughter and her husband were climbing close to Liberty Bell, also in the North Cascades. This is the same daughter we saw marry just last month.
Into the beginning of their climb, she lost her footing and both of them fell down 15 feet to land on a thin ledge that prevented them from careening down another 50 feet. She was face down and semi-conscious, her husband luckily only had a gash to the leg and was able to tie them to a nearby tree and call for help. In her state, she had begun asking questions like, “Are we married yet?” through a smile of broken teeth. Thankfully, they are both home now after she received surgery to a mangled wrist but will need repairs to damaged front teeth.
Why did they land on that tiny ledge and not continue to fall the rest of the way down? Momentum surely should have bounced them off. How are they now safe and sound when their accident could have ended with a much more grave result? Is it luck? Divine intervention? Why do some people walk away from accidents and others don’t?
Why do some people walk away from accidents and others don’t?
On the way home from my hike that same day, the car I was in hit an elk on the side I was sitting on. I am writing this so you know who came out on the winning side of that collision. The car did not have a mark on it. After my initial concern for the elk, it came to me how fortunate I was that we must have ended up going over the elk rather than striking it head on.
Yes, blessings are being counted. To live to tell what happened makes us all very thankful. But the reality is that not everyone gets that gift. My sister’s family still has questions about the loss of Karen last year that will never be answered because she did not survive her accident.
My sister and I talk about that and how those of us with faith were helped through that time. Karen’s children do not have faith and are still struggling with those questions. Why their mom? How could it have happened? Where is she now? Her daughter and her were very close and she doesn’t know what to make of the now. It is one thing to know the science of things (and I am the last person to deny science) but some things can’t be explained away, like the ache of a broken heart.
Life is full of things we don’t understand and may never fully comprehend. I don’t speak to say that having faith is a cure-all for grief, but I do know that it can make a world of difference in situations we just don’t understand or when simply thinking of your loved one as gone is not enough.
Some people will use their faith to justify why something happened or didn’t happen but I don’t think it works that way. The world is how the world is and we only have so much control over it. But what we do have is the ability to be thankful for the gift of life, however fleeting, and every moment is an opportunity to let our gratitude be known in hopes that it will inspire others.
So, again, I say I am thankful. Thankful for it all.
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