What’s your difficult hill?

"A Stout heart to a stey brae"

Everyone faces adversity in their life. There’s no doubt about that. Life is hard. It’s full of obstacles, injustices, and unfairness. Sometimes, however, life becomes a little easy and enjoyable. The peace might not last long, but it’s there.

It’s kind of like trail running. When I run with the boys at work we go up and down a lot of hills while we run on dirt roads. When a boy is having a hard time to continue pushing I like to narrate the process with him. As we go down, I tell him to increase his stride and let his weight do the work so he can gather up strength. Because when we start going back up we are already tired and that makes for a difficult hill.

Today on “Answering the Call”, we are going to be talking about a quote I came across recently:

“A stoot hairt tae a stae brae”

A Scottish proverb, spelled phonetically with the accent. It’s closer to “a stout heart to a stey brae.” Stey brae means something like “difficult hill”.

We were meeting for our weekly men’s group this past Monday when I came across this quote in “Studies in the Sermon on the Mount” by Oswald Chambers. We did some googling to figure it out and then kept discussing the topic. Then Ryan, my creative counterpart, asked the group, “what are some difficult hills in your life?”

The question stuck with me. I was honest in my answer, which is hard for me. Those guys are some of the fewest guys on the planet that I could be vulnerable and completely open with, so I told them about my difficult hills.

And guess what the result was?

My hills are difficult, but by putting it out there I realized that difficult hills call for a certain response, from a certain type of person. A stout heart isn’t about having everything be easy. It’s about being able to push passed normal limits and do what it takes to conquer. It takes a level of responsibility.

Something I tell the boys anytime they complain about something: if it was easy, then everyone would do it. If staying in shape was easy by running, then everyone would just do it. But they don’t. Because it’s hard. And being a person who can push past the difficult, to put their stout heart fully to the stey brae, it makes you become the person you need to be. And that’s why we do it. We run now to get practice and develop our stout hearts so that later, when push comes to shove and the chips are down, then we know we already have what it takes to answer the call.

And this applies to all sorts of areas in life. It’s about being responsible in the small things so that you can be responsible with the big things equally. Jesus talks about this when he says, “Whoever can be trusted with little can also be trusted with much and whoever is dishonest with little will also be dishonest with much.”

You can show responsibility in all sorts of small things and it will show in the big things. Parents do this to their kids when they make them walk and feed a stuffed animal to have them prove they can handle a real puppy. When you first start a job you don’t have many tasks and then as you get more acquainted then you can take on more complex tasks. And you run hard now so in a month you can run longer and faster and harder.

This is all good, but it lacks one thing: precision and clarity. That’s why the question is a so good. Because when I first read the question, I thought “oh yeah, that’s a great perspective and thought”. But then when I was forced to answer the question it put things into perspective. It made it real. I labeled exactly what the conflicts of my life were, I identified my difficult hills so I could see them with clarity and it made it easier to conquer them.

So, now that you have the perspective I’ll ask the question to you: What’s your difficult hill or hills? And what are you going to do to make your heart stout to be prepared for it?