Striving For Rare Air

Back in the mountains, time to write as inspiration abounds!

This year we found ourselves bogged down in Kansas City with projects, very little time with kids and grandkids, and temperatures reaching toward 100 degrees. It was stifling to our lifestyle! Don’t get me wrong…the time with kids, grandkids and dear friends is always precious and irreplaceable; but we found ourselves traveling down a blistering highway across a scorching hot Kansas as fast as we could to get to the higher elevations of Colorado!

Without thinking, in our brain-boiled fog, we drove in one day from 3000 ft elevation, to one of our favorite camping spots at 10000 ft elevation. Remember, that’s us wintering in Florida at 0 elevation, then planting ourselves in Missouri and Kansas at 500 ft elevation. And through that whole period of time I abandoned my diet for the most part…and it has consequences. The type of consequences that are negative anywhere, but at 10000 ft? Priceless!! And Breathless!!

I do not remember where I first latched onto the moniker “rare air,” as referencing being in higher elevations where oxygen is in shorter supply, but so invigorating…but I use it here in the mountains. Rare air is a big part of our love of the mountains!

But it has magnified my unattended physicality and resulting high blood pressure (complete with battling swelling feet due to “venous insufficiency”) and general aching joints.

Therefore, in the rare air of the mountains it is “do-or-die” and get back to the basics of health and fitness. In reality…I am carrying far too much baggage to be in this atmosphere requiring me to be at my 63 year old best.

Hebrews 12:1: “Let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. Let us run with endurance then race God has set before us. (NLT)

In simplifying terms, RARE AIR = SPIRITUAL LIFE! Taking stock of my spiritual health requires me to first of all identify those things I’ve been doing that cause me to sin and weigh me down from the rare air of spiritual living.

Wish this part was easier, but as Charles Swindoll once wrote, we humans “have a bent towards sin.” It comes natural to sin, to degrade, to break down, to stall, to live rotely…to breathe shallowly stagnate and dead air. We become accustomed to doing that which we were created NOT to do!

Secondly, striving for “rare air” must become my most expedient task; both physically and spiritually. Once you get a breath of fresh rare air…you do not want to leave! It changes how you view the world…in the moment.