Moving Mountains

This summer has been a really tough one as a parent, the toughest ever, for reasons I don't want to go into just yet but when looking for some books to take on holiday I picked up Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul from my bookshelf. A friend bought it for me when my eldest was young but I only read a few pages before it sat gathering dust on the shelf. It has survived numerous clear outs but I didn't get rid of it because I just knew I would want to read it one day.

Being in a tent at night with the children has meant that I've had lots of reading time and I whizzed through the book of inspiring stories, some heartwarming, some funny and some were truly heartbreaking but it was the perfect reading material for my current frame of mind.

One story that really impacted me was 'Moving Mountains'

There were two warring tribes in the Andes, one that lived in the lowlands and the other high in the mountains. The mountain people invaded the lowlanders one day and as part of their plundering of the people, the kidnapped a baby of one of the lowlander families and took the infant with them back up into the mountains.

The lowlanders didn't know how to climb the mountains. They didn't know any of the trails that the mountain people used and they didn't know where to find the mountain people or how to track them in the steep terrain.

Even so, they sent out their best party of fighting men to climb the mountain and bring the baby back home.

The men tried first one method of climbing and then another. They tried one trail and then another. After several days of effort however, they had climbed only a couple of hundred feet.

Feeling hopeless and helpless the lowlander men decided that the cause was lost and they prepared to to return to their village below. As they were packing their gear for the descent they saw the baby's mother walking toward them. They realised that she was coming down from the mountain that they hadn't figured out how to climb. And then they saw that she had the baby strapped to her back. How could that be?

One man greeted her and said "We couldn't climb this mountain. How did you do this when we, the strongest and most able men in the village, couldn't do it?"

She shrugged her shoulders and said "It wasn't your baby."

Jim Stovall
Bits and Pieces

I don't know if this story is true or a fable but it resonated with me hugely. No matter what my children do or say, no matter how much grief they cause I will always move mountains to make sure that they are safe and as happy as can be.