Kathmandu is kind of like a bowl. As you are flying in from the west you are flying with an incredible view of the front range of the Himalayan mountains. As you get closer you see this city begin to pop up, but it’s actually kind of set down in. The air around the mountains looks like it must be the cleanest purest air in the world tucked in against the snowy peaks. As you descend from 30,000 feet down into the city you begin to notice a smog hovering over the top of the city. When you get off the plane and outside into the air, you can smell it a bit and it burns your eyes. Hundreds of thousands of vehicles driving and people and animals and smoke and noise. If you have never been to a third world country the above sentence is the best way I can describe it, it’s just one of those things: you know it when you see it. If you have been to a third world country you know exactly what I’m talking about. Once you’ve been there for the better part of a day or at the most a few days, you don’t even really notice the haze and smog anymore. It’s almost as you become acclimated.
I have had some irritations lately, to be honest, getting here to Nepal was ripe with irritations. From the moment we got to the Nashville airport and even checking in our bags there was an issue and we sat at the counter for an hour and a half. Then of course we had a mechanical issue and had to sit on the tarmac for a couple hours. Then how could I forget 6 hours at JFK airport…if you’ve been, you know $25 hamburgers, temps in the terminal that are too hot or two cold and simply the friendliest people on the planet. From there it was just a quick 13 hour flight to Doha Qatar where my cell phone issues began and another 8 hour layover. Then 4 hours to Kathmandu and this grumpy old man with 2 bricked cell phones needed a nap the way a 2 year old does when they are overstimulated and over-tired.
Irritation is a funny thing. Those times where things just don’t go right, but more when things seem to stack up, where none of them are going right. I don’t know where you go in those places but if I am honest, I just get grumpy and bitter. Those of you who know me are snickering right now. You are thinking to yourself “he is always grumpy and bitter, what does irritation have to do with it.” I have one thing to say to you… Touché.
Irritation does two things to me, sometimes it drives me further into the smog, and then sometimes, often when the irritation seems to build up over time, it wakes me up. It makes me aware of my surroundings, and the attitude of my heart and to the reality that I have been living in smog and have become so acclimated to it that I no longer even notice.
This morning, I had one of those times, where I got a peek above the haze, saw a glimpse of the mountain air, took a breath in and said “Wow!” The glimpse came through a passage of scripture that I have read numerous times but never really stuck out to me before.
“In a desert land he found him, in a barren and howling waste. He shielded him and cared for him;he guarded him as the apple of his eye,” Deuteronomy 32:10
No matter how acclimated you and I become to the haze. No matter if we find ourself as the writer of Deuteronomy says “in a barren and howling waste” God is a shield and a guide. Sometimes you and I need the irritations to get our attention. It’s interesting, when you consider Kathmandu and where it is. This bowl is nestled into the most beautiful mountains on the planet, in a wild, unadulterated wilderness, a place that I have to imagine has to have some of the cleanest, purest air there is. It is so close, you just have to go a little way up in elevation to get above and out of the haze. Wherever you have found yourself today, may you get a a glimpse above the Haze.
aaronstetson 