Down from the Mountain

Here's a curious thing I noticed this year:  even though I live at camp, even though I live on the mountain, I still have a coming down from the mountain kind of experience.

For those of you wondering what on earth I'm talking about, it's the coming back from a retreat experience, or some other time out of time experience, the kind where you think, why can't all of life be this way?  For those of you with church experience, you may recognize various mountain top experiences,  like the Transfiguration story, where Jesus takes a few disciples up to the top of a mountain, where he is transfigured and he has discussions with theological greats, Moses and Elijah.  Understandably, the disciples don't want to leave.  

But every mountain top experience ends in leaving the mountain and going back to regular life.  In the past, my mountain top experiences at Lutheridge ended in a 12 hour drive back to the flatlands of South Florida.  It took me some time to get my regular life groove back, in part because of the drive.

I had thought that now that I live at Lutheridge, some of my trouble getting back into regular life rhythms might disappear, and some of them have.  Quilt Camp ended at 11, and I made my way home, a 2 minute drive.  Yesterday afternoon, I was still able to walk around camp, which was a nice change to my 12 hour drive trip home of past years.  But I still felt this sadness that Quilt Camp was over.

Part of my sadness comes from the return to a house that's under construction, with cramped work spaces--so different from the past few days at the Faith Center, with a work station that gave me plenty of room to spread out.

I decided that we needed to do something besides diving deep into our to do list.  So I suggested that we get pizza and watch a movie.  And that's exactly what we did.  I love our local pizza place, Acropolis, and we got two pizzas to go with our movie.  We watched Road House, both the brand new version with Jake Gyllenhaal, and the original with Patrick Swayze.  The original had more nudity, both had lots of people beating each other up with very few broken bones, and lots of explosions.  Neither required much brain power, which was what I wanted.

So here we are, Palm Sunday, the launch into Holy Week.  Let me go to get the day started.  It's another week of schedule disruptions, but that can be a good thing.  It's good to be jolted out of our regular life experiences, good to remember that there's more than what we perceive on a daily basis.