Your Mt. Rushmore

Whose face is on the Mt. Rushmore of your life? Whose image, name, or friendship has so supported you that it should be memorialized in stone?

In 1815 Sir Isaac Newton famously wrote to a friend, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” and our own lives and stories have proved his words true. Although we Americans love and celebrate the rugged individualist, very few of us have finished our races or arrived at our end zones alone. We are all the products and beneficiaries of those who have gone before us and sustained us along the way.

This does not mean that we haven’t worked incredibly hard or faithfully invested our best gifts and talents. Certainly, we have done that, and of course no one can do that for us. No one can obey God or resist temptation for us. No one can embrace the dark night of the soul or endure a traumatic day for us. But people can cheer us on while we stand. They can encourage us when earthquakes rattle our world or clouds blot out the sun.

Let’s thank them. Let’s tell them that if we were commissioned to carve a modern day Mt. Rushmore their likeness would get etched on the cliff.

In The Way of the Heart the late Henri Nouwen told a story from the ancient world of the desert fathers and mothers that describes these kinds of people. He wrote, “Three fathers used to go and visit blessed Anthony every year and two of them used to discuss their thoughts and the salvation of their souls with him, but the third always remained silent and did not ask him anything. After a long time, Abba Anthony said to him: ‘You often come here to see me, but you never ask me anything,’ and the other replied, ‘It is enough to see you, Father.’”1

I would need a big mountain to carve all of the faces of the people who have helped me along the way. I have seldom been able to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, rather, I have been upheld and dragged forward by people who loved and believed in me. Just seeing them is ministry just hearing their names invigorates my soul.

1. Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, HarperOne, 1981, p.33.