On Monday June 14th I completed an eleven day road trip from Chicago to Yelm, WA where Noah was hired on as the camp pastor at Cascades Camp for the summer.  There's nothing better than a beautiful camp settled at the base of Mt. Rainier, or at least that's what they told me.

I arrived amid the cover of clouds and hail, it was probably 55 degrees outside and I had just left friends, family and sunshine.  I had been regaled with stories of how great Cascades was, how beautiful everything but most of all most of all the mountain was. {Side note, they told me the lake was beautiful too, but you don't tell a Minnesota girl about beautiful lakes, just saying.}  Yet here I was, miles from home, trusting that God was calling us to the fifth-wheel trailer we were living in with no money, no job for me, no guarantee of future employment and not even a mountain view to grow on.

I sat in my trailer for six days editing a wedding and the cold, loneliness and eerie reality of just how far from comfort I really was had begun to set in.  I started to doubt everything, where I was, what I was doing, why I was there and even if that mountain really existed, if it really was as beautiful as everyone had said, if it would ever come out of those clouds.

Then, one day, while the staff played ultimate frisbee up by staff housing and everything was completely ordinary the clouds began to move.  The hope of revelation was coming, the skies were beginning to clear just slightly and I watched in anticipation like a child waiting for Christmas morning.  Oh, how I needed to know it was really there, that the mountain was waiting.

As many of you know I am looking for a job.  I would love to do photography full time but right now that isn't in the cards.  Today, I found out that I didn't get my most promising and only outstanding job opportunity.  I have applied for more than a hundred jobs and frankly it is getting tiring.  The doubt has a way of creeping in like it was an idea I had originally, that hope is gone, that I'm a failure and that I'll never get a job.  People tell me all the time that God has a plan, that there is hope and that what He has for me is more than I will have ever expected.  Everything that I know about God proves them right but it seems to be a day where a sign would be nice.

Back to that day in June, the clouds moved and I begged the sky to prove that it did hold the majesty of Rainier. And as the blue-hued clouds dissipated the pinkish glow of sunset on snow became obvious and I could have leaped tall buildings in a single bound.  It was true!  There in the glory of the setting sun rose forth a mountain more beautiful and more perfect than I could have imagined.  The clarity that followed was entirely worth the obscurity that preceded it.