BackstageAnyone who has climbed a real mountain knows the particular despair of the switchback.
You are working hard, your legs are burning, you have been walking for what feels like an hour — and then the trail bends back on itself and you find yourself looking down at a spot you passed twenty minutes ago, only a little higher. The summit is not visibly closer. The effort has not converted into obvious progress. And something in you wants to sit down on the rock and quit, not because you are weak, but because the climb refuses to feel like it is getting anywhere.
I think a great deal of the Christian life is lived on switchbacks, and I think most of us were never told that, so we assume the switchback means we are lost.
We are not lost. We are ascending. It just does not feel like ascending, because ascending rarely does from inside it.
The songbook written for the climb
Here is something worth knowing. Tucked into the middle of the Psalms is a small collection — fifteen short songs, one after another — and they carry a title that tells you exactly what they were for: songs of ascents. Songs of the going up. For generations, when the people of Israel traveled to Jerusalem for the great feasts, they sang these on the way. And "up to Jerusalem" was not a figure of speech. The city sat high in the hill country, so no matter which direction you came from, the last stretch of every pilgrimage was a climb. Thousands of ordinary people — families, elders, children, the footsore and the doubting — walking uphill together, and singing while they did it.
Sit with what that means. Yahuah did not only give His people songs for the mountaintop. He gave them a songbook specifically for the part where you are still climbing, still winded, still down in the switchbacks with the summit out of view. These are not victory songs sung at the destination. They are trail songs, sung by people who are tired and not there yet, precisely to get them there.
And the songs know it. They do not pretend the road is easy. One of them opens by lifting the eyes up to the hills and asking, essentially, where on earth is help going to come from — and only then answering that it comes from the Maker of those very hills, the One who does not let your foot slip and does not fall asleep on watch. That is not the language of someone strolling. That is the language of someone halfway up, calves shaking, checking their own footing, choosing out loud to trust the God at the top while still far from the top.
This is the genius of it. A song for the switchbacks does not deny the climb. It sanctifies it.
Why the song matters more mid-climb than at the summit
You would think you would need worship most at the top, in the moment of arrival. But watch a real ascent and you will see the truth: nobody needs the song at the summit. At the summit the view does the work; joy is automatic there. It is on the eleventh switchback, three hours in, legs gone, summit hidden, that a person actually needs something to keep the feet moving. That is where the song earns its keep. That is where it was designed to be sung.
A song does for a climb what almost nothing else can. It matches your rhythm to something outside your own discouragement. Your discouragement wants to set the pace, and its pace is stop. But a walking song has its own tempo, older and steadier than your mood, and if you will hand yourself over to it, it will carry your feet past the place where your feelings would have quit. This is why soldiers march to cadence and rowers pull to a count and laborers have always sung the long jobs down to size. The body follows a song where it will not follow a command. Endurance, it turns out, is not mostly a matter of willpower. It is a matter of what you are singing while you climb.
And notice — the pilgrims did not climb solo. They climbed in a crowd, singing the same songs together, which meant that on any given switchback, if your own voice had gone silent from exhaustion, you were still surrounded by the sound. Someone whose legs were fresher than yours that day was carrying the tune, and you could simply walk inside it until your own strength came back. That is the church at its truest: not a summit society of people who have already arrived, but a long line of climbers strung out across the mountain, each one at a different bend, all singing the same songs so that no one has to generate their own strength the whole way up. When your song fails, you borrow the person's ahead of you. Later, when theirs fails, you carry it for them.
To the one who is tired of climbing
So let me speak to whoever is reading this on a switchback right now — someone who has been faithful for a long time and cannot see that it has gotten them anywhere.
You prayed for years and the situation looks like the spot you passed a season ago, only a little higher. You have served, given, believed, held on, and the summit is not visibly closer than it was. And a voice keeps suggesting that the lack of a view means you have failed, or wandered, or been forgotten.
Hear me as a pastor who has climbed enough real mountains to trust the metaphor with his life: the switchback is not a detour from the path. The switchback is the path. It is how a trail gets up something too steep to take head-on. The bends that feel like going nowhere are the only reason the ascent is survivable at all. You are not walking in circles. You are gaining altitude in the only way altitude is ever actually gained — slowly, indirectly, by a route that hides the progress until you finally turn and look down.
So sing the trail song. Not the summit anthem you do not feel yet — the honest, plodding, uphill song that lifts its eyes to the hills and admits it needs help and looks to the Maker of the mountain anyway. Sing it in cadence with the ones climbing near you, and when your voice gives out, walk inside theirs. The God you are climbing toward is the same God who does not let your foot slip and never once dozes off while you ascend.
You are not there yet. That was never the requirement. The requirement was only that you keep singing, and keep climbing, one switchback at a time — and the songs for exactly that were written down for you a very long time ago by people who were just as tired, and who made it up, and who wanted you to have their walking music.
