“What satisfies you? What satiates your desires? What quenches your thirst or fills your hunger in your life? What is it that you yearn for in your life that kinda gets you up in the morning? What is that? It’s that that you’re willing to sacrifice for that you’re willing to sacrifice everything because it satiates that true desire in your heart. Now I’m going to tell you a story. Last week I went to Colorado. I went to Colorado for a hike. I went to Colorado with twelve other men and we were part of this ministry to raise awareness and raise money for foster care kids who age out of foster care and so we went on this hike and I guess I’m not the best person to ask about it at the time because many people asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ and I said, ‘I actually don’t know. I know I’m going to Colorado.’ but they were like, ‘Where? Where in Colorado?’ ‘I’m not sure.’ Some people asked me, ‘Now what mountain are you climbing?’ and I was like, ‘You know I actually don’t know what mountain I’m climbing. All I know is I’m going with this group and they needed a priest.’ We ended up going to Buena Vista, CO and our goal was to hike up Mt. Columbia and Mt. Harvard and what we did was we drove overnight. Not only that, it rained and hailed basically every day. It rained and hailed every day we were there. Especially when we got there we drove overnight, we got there that morning and we started hiking up. We had to hike up about nine to ten thousand feet to get to our base camp and from our base camp that’s where we would stay and then do our hikes throughout the place, but on our way up it just drenched and poured and we had our fifty pound packs and we were just hiking up this mountain in the rain and the hail. Now once we got there we were gonna summit the mountain two days later so just to get acclimated to the altitude, but again it continued to rain and hail, rain and hail. It wasn’t until Sunday where we saw that ok the weather is pretty good here. It’s sunny enough that we can summit the mountain. So on Sunday we got up about 4:00am, left by 5:00 to summit this mountain and it was treacherous. It was hard. Actually I’ve never done this before, but what I thought was the mountain was actually not the mountain. It was beyond that. Literally, we took small hikes throughout the week just to kind of hike a little bit and what I thought was a mountain was not. We got there and then we went further and it went up again and we went over boulder fields and I think sometimes if it had just been me hiking on this mountain I think I would have quit because it’s hard, but there’s people behind you and in front of you so it’s easy to go as a group and when we got to this tall mountain when we submitted it was one of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen. They had a sign and it said, ‘Mt. Harvard.’ and it was 14,420 feet and it was a clear day so you could see all the other mountains all the fourteeners around and it was gorgeous, but just like everything in the world, you get to the peak and then it’s over. You see it, it’s great, it’s beautiful and then you go down. A lot of times in our lives we reach for things that fade away.
In the Gospel today Jesus says, ‘Do not work for the food that perishes, but the food that lasts forever that Christ will give you.’ What are some of the things that we work for that perishes? When I was younger I loved to get phones, the next big thing, the next phone. I liked to have the latest phone and then you buy the latest phone and two months later now it’s the old phone and it doesn’t satisfy you. There’s things that you work for, maybe it’s climbing the corporate ladder people used to say and you’d say, ‘If I just get up there that will satisfy me. I will be satisfied in my life.’ Or maybe, ‘If I make the team that will satisfy me.’ or even relationships, ‘If my relationship was just better that would satisfy me.’ There’s all these things we grasp for in our life that we say, ‘I will sacrifice for that and it will satisfy me.’ But again Christ says, ‘Do not work for things that perish. Work for things that will last forever that Christ will give you.’
Now once I got up to this mountain and we climbed down we had a bonfire that night and it was me and the twelve other men and we talked about what happened in these last couple days. We kinda shared. One thing I didn’t tell you is that I was actually able to celebrate Mass on that mountain. It was Sunday, the seventeenth Sunday in ordinary time, last week and I was able to celebrate Mass on top of that mountain. One of the men there told us the story of a young man maybe around my age up on the mountain and he said that he’d been struggling a lot with his faith and a friend told him, ‘The Lord will give you the answer this week.’ and that week he was climbing up this mountain on his own, the same mountain we were going up to and he was struggling. Either it was the altitude or it was his body, but it was a lot harder than he expected and he asked God, ‘Why am I struggling so much.’ I guess in his mind the answer was, ‘You will find out when you reach the peak. You will find why when you reach the peak.’ Well when he reached the peak, little did he know that he would see a priest and twelve men celebrating Mass at 14,420 feet. The reason he struggled he realized is for him to be there and what he saw was Christ. He saw Christ in the Eucharist and it changed him. He saw his faith before him. He saw what he needed to do and he shared this with one of the men before us.”