A Picture of Me

Sometimes I don’t like myself, but I like the person in this captured moment.

Shall I tell more?

It’s a photo of an explorer with legs covered in bug bites, a child of God in his playground, casually holding an exotic bird, wearing a shirt received for overcoming obstacles and shorts gifted from a valued friend. Unseen are jungle sounds and jungle smells, the heat, a cellphone and its data lost forever, a day-old sprain of the right ankle with miles behind and miles to go, a troop of friends just outside the frame, and an eagerness to assist fellow hikers with their particular burdens.
I’m posting it as a reminder for the times when I’m not satisfied with the person in the mirror.

This was taken near the end of a 28 mile jungle trek to Colombia’s Lost City and back. The journey was not especially difficult, but it came with complications. Just shy of halfway I twisted my ankle and had to complete the hike on a grade 2 sprain. Shortly thereafter, I lost my mobile phone. The solo trip home would include arranging transportation to Santa Marta airport for a flight to Bogota, where I would need to get a rapid Covid test and proof of a negative result between arriving at 9:30pm and departing at 1:00am, so that I could board the plane to the U.S. if an empty standby seat existed. All this had to be managed without a cellphone’s access to internet, email, or apps, in a language I didn’t speak, while limping. Was I daunted? No way! God’s got me, and this is how adventures go.