When you reach the top of North America’s highest chairlift in Breckenridge, Colorado, you will sometimes see a string of people behind and above the lift, carrying skis and poles, climbing even higher.

Aside from the joyful pursuit of even fresher powder above the lifts and the chance to be one of the first to lay fresh tracks in pure, light snow, what is it that pulls us on to persevere even when the odds may be against us and the going hard and steep, or when we have exhausted the easier routes?

We are called by soul to follow a unique spiritual path. Oftentimes, soul seems to need the path to be difficult, treacherous and steep.  At these times, it will require every last bit of energy and reserves that we have. Such times may even feel like they will destroy us.

The hard truth is that soul seems to want to push us beyond our limits.  We will be called to enter places that five years ago and if someone had asked us; “Would you ever do or could you ever get through, x, y or z?” We would have absolutely said, “No way, never.”

When we follow a deep path, a spiritual journey with its share of painful trials, we discover only then all that we are capable of becoming. We know that there is no other way we could be who we are without these hardships, these trials.

And then one year, two years, maybe later, we may feel that we are in exactly the place that we need to be and we cannot imagine life any other way.  When we look back at the hardships that we were enduring a few years ago, we will say, “Yes, there was no other way that it could have been.”

We are called to go the extra mile because soul beckons. We persevere because if we don’t, we fall back into a dangerous “normality” that has become dull, feels “dead” and lacks soul. We find no meaning or support there.

We persevere not as a mad pursuit forward at all costs, but as a conscious step into the unknown and into the possibility of a soul-filled life that is calling us to become more than we thought possible.