CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN ‘TILL YOU FIND YOUR DREAM

Boys and girls, today’s Yiddish word is: Schmalz. Can you say Schmalz?

Schmalz literally means chicken or goose fat. You could use this word in the following sentence: “That movie was really schmaltzy.”

In this case you might be referring to a movie shown on the Hallmark Channel. (I must admit that I occasionally watch – – and like – – romcoms shown on the Hallmark Channel. This is particularly true of their Christmas love story flicks.)

I think some people find The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews to be really schmaltzy.  Some would say that one of the schmaltzyist moments of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical is when the mother superior sings Climb Every Mountain. Several of the verses go like this:

Climb every mountain,

Search high and low,

Follow every byway,

Every path you know.

Climb every mountain,

Ford every stream,

Follow every rainbow,

'Till you find your dream.

But I love the song, and I believe that it contains several great spiritual truths. But then again, I also occasionally like chopped chicken liver, which traditionally has schmaltz as one of its ingredients.

Carol Kuykendall

Well, the “climb every mountain” theme recently hit me between the eyes in a recent post written by Carol Kuykendall. Carol is the author of several books including Give Them Wings: Preparing for a Time When Your Teens Leave Home, Learning to Let Go, Five Star Families, and Every Child Needs.

Carol also was the special director of MOPS International. MOPS stands for “Mothers of Preschoolers.” My late wife, Debbie, went to an excellent MOPS program at a local church when my daughter Robin was little. MOPS will run a spiritually centered program for moms while the kids have great fun in another room. Before Debbie made her transition, she was planning to start a MOPS program at our Unity church in Tulsa.

But there was also a second common ground between Carol and Debbie. Carol’s son Derek was diagnosed as a type one diabetic when he was a little kid— and so was Debbie.

Debbie really felt that type one diabetes and type two diabetes should be called by very different names because they are really different diseases. In type one diabetes, the body does not have the ability to perform any regulation of blood sugar levels.

In most human beings, when our blood sugar levels rise or fall, our incredible bodies self-adjust and self-correct to stabilize the level of blood sugar in our bodies. But for the type one diabetic, no self-adjusting or self-correcting takes place within their bodies. This means that many activities which we take for granted are far more difficult for the type one diabetic.

Debbie Belous

For Debbie, this meant that she had to carry certain foods with her in case her blood sugar levels took a nose dive. It also meant that she had to carry insulin with her and hypodermic needles in case her blood sugar levels rose beyond safety. It also meant that she had to prick her finger many times during the course of a day to obtain blood that could be used in portable monitoring machines to measure where her blood sugar levels were.

Debbie was really good at this. In fact, when she was giving birth to Robin, her doctor said that he would leave all of the blood sugar stuff to Debbie since “you have a better handle on it than I do.” It also meant that Debbie could not eat many foods.

Carol wrote that, when her son was diagnosed with type one diabetes in the 1980s, it was “especially difficult for a child to accept and manage. We could help with the physical responsibilities, but these new realities also threatened him emotionally,” she added.

Prior to the type one diabetes diagnosis, Derek had been outgoing, had many friends, and was very athletic. “Now, he felt less confident. He didn’t want to go to a friend’s birthday party because he couldn’t eat cake and didn’t want to be ‘different,’” Carol said.

She started praying that her son would not change his choices or level of self-confidence, because of diabetes. “May this challenge strengthen, not diminish, him,” she prayed.

Derek did face some difficult challenges growing up. But he went off to a college, which was far away from his home, and “he learned to handle his challenges and lean on his friends and faith,” she commented.

Twenty years after his type one diabetes diagnosis, Derek decided to celebrate and climb one of Colorado’s “fourteeners” (mountains that are higher than 14,000 feet). With his friends, Derek offered prayers of gratitude at the top of the snow covered mountain.

Soon after the climb to the top, Carol and her husband hosted a dinner for the group, and they thanked God for “His answer to a mother‘s prayer.”

Debbie did not climb a “fourteener,” but she accomplished many things, which were not easy for a type one diabetic including: becoming a really accomplished motorcyclist, enjoying nature as a vigorous hiker, and giving birth and being an active mother for her daughters. Debbie was also an accomplished, editor and writer (which included articles in Unity Magazine and Chicken Soup for the Soul).

As I think about Derek and Debbie, I see two people who did not let the challenges that they faced block them from the opportunities that they experienced. They both climbed the mountain.

Charles Fillmore, the cofounder of the Unity movement, metaphorically associated mountain tops with peak spiritual experiences. Like Derek and Debbie, we should not let our challenges block us from climbing our mountains.

And I don’t care if some people think the above is schmaltzy.