Just this past weekend the Banff Mountain Film Festival came to my town, a film festival that I have enjoyed attending for about 20 years now. The films center on mountain culture and outdoor adventure, and often serve to inspire personal and relational growth in the pursuit of bold and courageous goals. I recall a film that I watched at this festival a couple years back that focused on the Colorado river. This film followed the adventures of two men who sought to kayak the river from its source as snow melt in the Colorado Rockies all the way through the Grand Canyon and down to its end in the Gulf of California (Mexico).

As the film followed these two adventurers, the crux of their journey came in the last 100 miles before reaching the Gulf, where the river itself ended… not reaching its culminating end in the Gulf of California. Following these two men as they completed their journey on foot I learned that the Colorado river hadn’t reached its end in the Gulf since the 1960’s, and that this is because 70% of the river is consistently siphoned off to provide water for farms and cities all across the Southwestern US (including California, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico).

Likewise, the life within each of us is strong and powerful like the Colorado river. That life breathed into us from the One is divinely inspired and seeks its culminating expression in the world (just as the Colorado river seeks the Gulf of California). And the world is such that there is a never-ending number of entities that wish to draw from that life, many in order to source their own expressions in the world, and some simply for the sake of depleting the life found within us. Generally speaking, we are able to identify those siphons that are not worthy of our strength… that dissipate our strength without producing anything of value in the world. These we generally regard as immoralities, or wrongs… Christianity uses the term sin. We are generally able to identify these siphons for what they are, though we often struggle to cut them off (stopping them from siphoning off our strength and life which is seeking a more worthy and culminating expression in the world).

And while these life depleting siphons can be challenging to cut off, what are often even more challenging are those that wish to draw from that life within us in order to source their own expressions in the world. These are more challenging because they are very often worthy causes, and the world is full of countless numbers of worthy causes. The challenge is, that if one allows his/her strength to be siphoned off for any and all worthy causes that present themselves, that one will never reach his/her own culminating expression in the world… that which uniquely belongs to him/her. Here, one’s own life/strength becomes so diffuse so quickly that it ceases to exist altogether… becomes only a shadow of a self.

This is a problem because the One has breathed that life, that energy, that strength into that particular individual… and each one of us as particular individuals. He has entrusted each individual with that life to cultivate, grow, protect, and steward it so that it can reach its culminating expression. It is a matter of stewardship, each individual is responsible to safeguard and protect that strength within them, to direct it towards its culminating end. And this requires the ability to say No to otherwise worthy causes.

I do not mean to say that all who wish to draw from us should be cut off, but I do mean to say that one neglects his/her responsibility before the One when choosing to not value and honor that life (within the self) properly… when he/she gives it away to all others indiscriminately. There is a responsibility to discern those worthy and noble causes which align with and compliment/enhance one’s own culminating expression from those which are altogether different/distinct. And those which are altogether different/distinct we need to be able to say no to, while still honoring and appreciating them for what they are. In so doing, we preserve and honor that life/strength which has been given to us as individuals to cultivate and express. And in doing this, we become a source of life/strength and beauty in the world that has a far greater impact than that which allows itself to become diffuse. The expression of that strength becomes ordered and cultivated, a sustainable source of life for others that culminates in something far greater than itself.

…while one kind of despair steers blindly in the infinite and loses itself, another kind of despair allows itself to be, so to speak, cheated of its self by ‘the others’. By seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself, in a divine sense forgets his own name, dares not believe in himself, finds being himself too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, along with the crowd.

Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, p. 64

*The accompanying music for this post is My Silver Lining, by First Aid Kit. Find this song at the top right of the site.

My Silver Lining, Stay Gold, First Aid Kit