Every summer my church has gone to Ccolorado for the seignior highers. It is a trip to get away from electronics and just be up somewhere beautiful living life. No distractions. No restfulness. Just God. To most people who go on this trip, this sounds like a great time. However I am slightly different than those who think that. I have grown up in church all my life. Because of this I have struggled believing a religion. From what I have seen, growing up in church, all there is to do is follow rules upon rules until you die. The worst part is you can never fully know, while you’re alive, if what you believe will happen when u die, will really even happen. I am not the only friends who believe this either.

Me and a couple of my friends from camp have this want to seek adventure; however, there were many rules at the camp that don't allow adventure. As much as this upsets me, I don’t blame them for not allowing kids to explore alone. After all, there is 200+ kids and we are all in the mountains. This can be very dangerous.  Despite the danger and the rules of the camp, Ryan, Sam and I have wanted to climb this mountain we saw close to our cabin called the chalk cliffs. This was strictly not allowed because of the dangerous conditions of this mountain. It is made of chalk and every step ground is shifted, dusted and blown away into the strong winds that make it hard to breath and climb. Even though there are rules against climbing this mountain, we want to climb it. We heard there was a huge cave at the top and we wanted that to be our goal because no one had ever gotten to it at our camp. It wasn’t the fact that we would’ve been the first to get up there that made us risk our lives and break the rules, but our want for adventure, fun and adrenaline. Not to mention the indescribable view that would be waiting for us on top. So we start making a plan to sneak out and climb it.

The next morning, Ryan, Sam and I had slowly snuck out of our cabin and started our trek. We had tons of water to keep us going, food for when we were low on energy, athletic tape for if we got cut and most of important, a goal to reach the top. It was about 6 in the morning when we snuck out because breakfast was at 7:30. This gave us 45 minutes to get up, 15 minutes to rest and take pictures and 30 minutes to get down. We could not get off schedule or we would get caught and get in trouble. We began our hike up and slowly, as we increased up the mountain, our water amount was decreasing, our energy levels were dropping much faster than we thought, and we had already eaten all our food. We took almost an hour to get even halfway up the mountain.

So far, no injuries. The mountain was now getting steep and slippery at an incredibly fast. This made us even more tired and slow. We were starting to lose hope. It was getting incredibly tiring and scary. We came close to turning back, but our little determination somehow kept us going. I was starting to wonder if this was all worth it, then I saw the cave. This was the best feeling i had ever gotten. We all of a sudden had strength and even more of a determination. We climbed all the way to the cave, found a place to sit, and turned around. The view was staring at us dead on, face to face. It was unspeakable.

To see this in person was the most stunning and beautiful thing i’d experienced in the longest time. At this moment it was that I realized I would never have experienced this amazing journey, view and feeling if I had followed the rules. That made me realize, if all that religion is is a bunch of rules, how much in life would I miss out on if all I did was follow them? This doesn’t mean that if there is a rule not to do something that i’m immediately going to do it, but rather some rules hold us back from doing the things we love and sometimes life is more enjoyable when the rules are broken.