Preikestolen

Wow on Monday the district decided that we all wanted to go and hike Preikestolen. I seriously recommend that you all go and Google Preikestolen. I guarantee that it won't have the same affect as if you had hiked it yourself. But it'll give you all a little more background. In order to make this adventure happen and still have time to email home, some serious planning had to be done. Luckily our district leader is a champ and got right on that. He, with help from the district, was able to find buses, figure our times and who to invite and so on. We got it approved by President Hill, since it's a rather intense hike up to a major cliff and we were good to go. 

We woke up rather early Monday morning in order to get ready and send an email or two before meeting up at the docks by 7:30-ish in the morning. We would have to take a ferry and a bus to get there. We met at the docks at 7:30am, got our tickets, and were off. With our P-day ending at 6 PM we knew we would half to get up and down this mountain pretty quickly. I believe we gave ourselves the average  two hours to get up, 30 or so minutes at the top and two hours to get back down. This was pretty good time to hike up and down Preikestolen, About the average actually, but everything had been planned perfectly so that we could grab the right bus back to the ferry which would put us back in Stavanger with just enough time to email home. 

One thing you all need to know about the Stravanger area is that it rains quite a bit. The forecast had said only in 11% chance of rain on P-Day and so we figured that was pretty good chances for us to have a nice, rain free hike up Preikestolen. We got off the ferry and onto the bus and everything was perfect, but as we neared Preikestolen we started to see some raindrops on the windows and some rain clouds in the distance. It was all a bit of a bummer, but we didn't let that get us down. Heck, we were in beautiful Norway about to hike one of God's beautiful creation that people come from all over the world to see. How amazing is that? 

The bus finally dropped us off at the bottom of the mountain in our group.  We said a quick prayer and laid a few ground rules to ensure a safe and fun hike up to the top and then we were off. We had a couple of avid runner's in our group and so they kind of took off as the rest of the group, for the most part, worked their way up the mountain together. It was actually a really cool experience. I have never experienced anything quite like it. It was not the easiest thing I've ever done, but I would gladly do it again. There's something about being out in nature, in God's wonderful and majestic creations, that makes you think and ponder. 

I've been reading a book entitled "Light in the Wilderness- Explorations in the Spiritual Life," by M. Catherine Thomas and in this book she has an entire chapter devoted to 'Nature's Holy Plan: Nature Wakens Man From the Dream.'  In the beginning she quotes William Woodsworth and his poem "Lines Written in Early Spring." She goes on to talk about nature and the purpose there of. She says something that I have grown to love. She writes,"... I have been brought to tears by the love shining through it all. And more then enlivened, I have known that I was alive in Christ; I have known that I was beholding life expressing it's joy in the "midst of the power of God" and that I was witnessing "God moving in his majesty and power" (D&C 88: 45-47).  I have begun to understand the purpose of the spirit in nature. She goes on to say that, "natures role is to arrest man's attention so that he can hear that voice from heaven."  I truly believe that is why God gave us such beautiful nature here on the earth. 

While I was on the top of that cliff, I thought to myself how beautiful and grand this mountain and the waters beneath are and how God took the time to create such beauty for us because he loves us. And if he is willing to take that time in order to give us a beautiful place to live, how much time and love did he put into making us the beautiful spirits and people that we can be. At the end of her chapter on nature Thomas says, "the purest beauty is always moral. Wordsworth had noticed what Lussegran did - that the light in man and nature were the same light, we're of one piece, and flourished only in love and moral goodness. Wordsworth writes that he had come to recognize the nature "The anchor of my purest thoughts, The soul of all my moral being." Nature stairs us so deeply precisely because it's spirit is continuous with the soul of our moral being; it addresses an aspiration in us. The divinity in Nature calls to the Divinity in Man to awaken to that beauty in himself if which is "a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells," even as he must wade through the turmoil and pollutions of the earthly life; for man's essence is "of quality and fabric...divine."  We find man placed in Nature's lap so as to delight him, enliven him, and awaken him to his divinity." That is what nature is truly about. 

God gave us this nature and this beautiful world to remind us of our very own beauty and help us to remember our divine nature. I realized as I sat at the top of Preikestolen that life is not always easy, and neither was that hike, but that our reward is truly beautiful. That we are all sons and daughters of the living God and that even though we may feel small in comparison to all of his creations, we are precious and he loves us more than we can ever come to comprehend in this life. I'm grateful for the opportunity that we had to go and hike Preikestolen and for the knowledge that I gained from nap experience. I am thankful for not only the beautiful nature all around me, but, most importantly, the beautiful people that surround me. I love you all!

Klem

Søster Blankmeyer