For months now, I’ve been counselling Mrs. Dee and her husband about their quest for mountain living. Like me, they’re faithful Black Conservatives carefully watching apocalyptic signs and urged on by Ellen White’s classic compilation Country Living. Since I’m the only Black person they know who made a conscious decision to leave the cities and move to a rural mountain village in White America, they found someone to confide in. This public letter addresses the harsh realities of mountain living to all who have the courage to live out their wildest dream.

Do You Really Trust Him?

That’s how I should have started our conversation.

The questions Mrs. Dee had ranged from finding affordable housing, to career choices in a rural community, to finding ways for personal evangelism. Then our conversations drifted to a never-ending series of fearful scenarios and our conversations were often in deadlock. Mrs. Dee wasn’t afraid about being stuck in her mountain cabin with no electricity and submerged in six feet of snow in a torrential snowstorm, as it happened in my first winter in the mountains. Mrs. Dee wasn’t afraid of her car swerving on the ice glazed rural roads swinging over the other side of the berm into a ditch and hoping for someone to rescue her from freezing to death, as it happened in my second winter in the mountains. Mrs. Dee wasn’t afraid of coming head to head with lone coyotes and bears, unarmed, praying they would waltz away from precipitating any mischief, as it happened almost every year until my neighbor derided me for not having bear spray permanently fixed on my hips at all times. Mrs. Dee wasn’t afraid of starvation when the delivery trucks were barred from our mountain rural roads because they were in such bad condition from the storms it would be unsafe for the truckers and we fearfully watched our grocery shelves emptying out, as it happened last winter.

Mrs. Dee wasn’t afraid of burning to death when our mountains were surrounded by raging forest fires that consumed 35,000 acres of forest in a few days, as it happened this past summer. All the many ways to die in the mountains and yet I’m still alive…I thought to myself as I recounted all my memories and yet even those did not deter this faithful couple.

But what Mrs. Dee was afraid of was several things that only occurred to me in the third year of mountain living: prejudice, mistreatment and harassment. It only occurred to me three years later because I was so focused on survival I had no time to ponder the social difficulties of integrating into a racially complex rural community. They call it cabin fever, not from the elements, but the people.

“See that’s why I wouldn’t live there…” Mrs. Dee would respond in her Black American accent. You’re right Mrs. Dee, you aren’t ready. It’s not nature’s elements, wild coyotes and bears, scarcity of resources, lack of community care and compassion, roving rural racists, slumbering country church, inadequate medical care that you should be concerned about. The most important concern above all others is: Do you really trust Jesus Christ? If you really knew Him then you wouldn’t have questions because you believe He has already provided solutions.

“God will never lead you to a place where His grace cannot protect you.
God will never place you in a position for which He has not made provision.”

It’s a Jungle Out There

After covering all the bases in their mental preparation for mountain living, it became apparent that it was Mrs. Dee’s husband that was the reason for their delay.

Soon the truth surfaced – racism – and Mrs. Dee’s husband perched up on his seat angrily. Since it was the proverbial elephant in the room we were now in a conversational impasse.

Purposefully and tactfully I tried to lay out the painful reality. Years ago, when I first expressed my desire for mountain living there was only one Black woman I knew who was already living in the mountains. She, my elder now at sixty years, had the wisdom to allow the novel wanderlust for adventure to mature into action and didn’t nip my desire at the bud with scary tales of roving rural racists, knowing that alone would deter my innocent heart.

More importantly, this Black woman perceived that moving to the mountains with fearful expectations would hinder my maturity spiritually and pragmatically in how to deal with people and life in a realistic way. The truth is that racism though alive and breeding in the mountains happens rarely, though suddenly and aggressively, and predictably during political or economically volatile seasons. Therefore, mathematically speaking, the odds are still odds if you look at it purely from a probabilistic level, and yet somehow those ‘incidents’ seem to outweigh all the positive memories. So instead of postulating what may or may not happen, what my elder showed me was keen intuition, unclouded discernment, and sober judgeent on how to deal with each situation, not losing out on the bigger picture. After decades of experience she earned her rightful position as elder in her White community.

If God has called someone to the mountains or rural environment to live as an, ethnic or religious minority, it’s to come to head with the part of the world that never progressed beyond its rugged past. “That’s why they go to the mountains because they know they can get away with it…” Mrs. Dee’s husband angrily exhorted. “What do you do when you are grossly outnumbered and living in an isolated community far away from law-abiding civilization?”

God’s solution for me was short: it came in a barely five foot tall, nearly sixty year old, feisty Mexican lady. When I first started working for her business I noticed very quickly that she made up for her size with her amount of fight. No one, no matter how rich, how tall, how big, how privileged, how educated, how rude, how nonsensical, could outwit, outmaneuver or outplay her. In fact, she became so legendary that her social enemies came to her years later asking for a truce and quickly returned back to the bushes of obscurity when their apologies were unwelcomed.

“Prejudice in my mountains? I would deal with them first before they got to me” she would have explained. It’s a jungle out there and she’s not going down without a fight. “This is my mountain and I’m not going anywhere!”

Perhaps that’s the difference between city folk and country folk. While city folk are ready to uber their way back to the city at every sense of discomfort, country folk are so conditioned by life they will ride it out to the bitter end.

Pack Your Bags, Mrs. Dee

That’s where I wish our conversation would be, hopefully, soon, for time is hastily ticking on in our prophetic calendar.

What is your motivation for mountain living, Mrs. Dee? If it’s to escape the city, you’ll find all the city nonsense here: crime, poverty, misfortune, angry people, and moral pollution.

But if you’re on a mission to bring the gospel to a different part of the world, you’re in good company. The work in the country requires a new wave of brave, courageous, persistent, tough warriors. Truthfully, I was neither of those things when I moved to the mountains. I was timid, insecure and cowardly: a lifelong city girl. But if God can make a mountain woman out of me He can do that for you. “That’s why they come to the mountains,” a boxing agent once told me about the professional boxers living in our mountains, “it helps their training preparation for the big fight and gives them an advantage over the enemy on game day.”

Warriors are made, they’re not naturally born. They need to know when to fight and how to fight. Not with fists and words, but real life fighting is the warfare of perseverance, forbearance, resilience, prudence, fasting and prayer (2 Corinthians 10:4).

A fighter fights out of personal convenience, but a warrior fights for a cause bigger than self. If your soul burns for justice, mercy and righteousness, God will make a warrior out of you. It doesn’t matter if you’re Black, White, Mexican, elderly, single or poor, it doesn’t matter how it starts, but you can end with the final blow and throw your best punch at whatever mountain life throws at you.

The rules of the jungle declare: respect is the badge of honor, courage is the best defense, and never under any circumstance whatsoever show weakness, unless it is the kind Paul talked about (2 Corinthians 12:10). That is how we’re all still thriving in mountain living: one battle after another, one calamity after another, one natural disaster after another, one misfortune after another, season after season, year after year, we keep fighting on, until the mountains become who we are as mountain people.

Mrs. Dee, it’s time to pack your bags. Leave the city behind. Offload all the worrying, complaining and learned helplessness.

Practice now to live a simplified lifestyle, wean off toxic drama and relationships, and learn how to be self-sufficient. Learning how to deal with difficulties now will train you for mountainous adversities. Learning not to fret about small inconveniences will help you face the fear of death. Learning to laugh, smile and love will make the long harsh winters seem like a breeze. Learning to be grateful for the smallest things will make the privations minor. Taking everything one step at a time will make the longest days come to a close, in God’s good time. Life is hard, life is unfair, life is cruel; these are facts. But our God is bigger than the facts of life and His yoke is easy, His burden is light, and He is merciful and kind.

Faith That Moves Mountains

Will you make it in mountain living, Mrs. Dee? That’s up to you.

As my best friend always said, “God is waiting on you, it’s not you that is waiting.” God has already made the provision, He knows where He will send you, where you will live, what you will eat, what clothes you’ll wear, what to do with your hair care, who will have your back. He has a plan for your life.

Do you trust in Him? Money won’t save you in the mountains, kinfolk will abandon you at the first sight of trouble, your feminine beauty may bring out of the woodworks the cruelest jealousies and appeal to the appetites of ravaging mountain men, the laws of the land won’t be enough to shield you from sociopaths, and much of what you hold so dear will be stripped away in your quest for survival. Do you trust that even then, this is His perfect pleasing will and that His will makes you perfectly happy? The mountains are my home because here I am perfectly loved by God and experience His mountainous love daily.

When the day is gone and another mountainous day arrives, I look at my mountains and I know the same God who loved me yesterday will love me again today: an unchanging love.

Perhaps that’s why God is calling you to the mountains, maybe this is a kind of love you need to experience as conspicuously as in the mountains, in the face of storm, frost, fire and disaster, perhaps it requires such extremes to be so perfectly demonstrated. Perhaps this is the kind of love you need beyond all questionable doubt, just like the mountains building up to a holy, trusting love.

“For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities no powers, nor things present no things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38,39).

Do you believe God loves you that much? Do you need more faith to live in the mountains?

What mountains are holding you back: doubt, fear, worry, unbelief? What memories are blocking your experience with God that He needs you in the mountains high above any clouds? There were a lot of heavy clouds in my life and many mountains in my journey. I discovered that God’s love is above the city nonsense, political thuggery, racial stuff, social betrayals, economic woes, bizarre illnesses, heartbreaking griefs and climatic melodramas. Somewhere above the mountains, God’s love and mercy towers over all the earth. A love that no fear can cast away, a mountain that won’t be shaken, a soaring height that won’t be intimidated, upwards and onwards to everlasting life.

Dear Mrs. Dee,

The mountains are calling. Are you the next mountain woman?

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