These valleys are part of the journey a lot of folks want to avoid. I can understand wanting to avoid the valley. The valley is dark, cold, lonely.

Humans have always sought to avoid their personal valleys. There have always been ways to escape. In the early days it was corn liquor, but as society advanced, more escape routes were developed.

An artist friend just recently described some of her friends as having “disengaged from the journey.”

My artist friend said: “What gets me is how all of this escape is now sanctioned and accepted. It’s like no one wants to live anymore. If one won’t go through the valley, they’ll never get to the next mountain. Why can’t we accept that everything is a cycle? Bad times come, but the good times follow.”

It’s easily understandable why one would want to avoid the valley’s bad times. But if life is a journey, then avoiding the valley means one is simply stuck. My artist friend said it well: “If we’re not willing to feel life’s pain, then we’ll never feel life’s joy.”

I have struggled through several valley’s worth of difficulties. But more and more it seems the whole point and richness of living is tied to facing the struggle and staying in the game when it would have been easier — in the short run — to have simply given up.

Everyone I have ever met who’s worked through difficult times has told me they were better for it. They always say there’s more to life than simply existing.

Mountains and valleys work together to create the overall landscape of our life. When we are on the mountaintop, we find there’s another mountain up ahead. So we set out to reach it, and land smack in the middle of a blasted valley. To turn back on the journey is to turn one’s back on one’s life. The safety of turning back becomes a prison where the sun never quite shines and never quite sets, where being shielded from pain prevents one from laughing. Isolation’s protection quickly becomes the agony of a long, slow low-grade suicide.

These statements are sometimes taken as judgmental, as if I believe life should be easy.

Valleys have taught me life is anything but easy. But I believe the valley’s struggle is the very basis of life’s joy. Through those struggles we reach the next mountain, where we find reason and purpose for living.

I cannot begin to criticize anyone for hiding. My own experiences have taught me none of us should lose hope. There is great power in what sometimes appears to be the impossible task of simply hanging on.

I stand convinced valleys appear as gifts to teach us to recognize and accept the deeper life every one of us are destined to live.

(Editor’s Note: Email David Clark at dclark@outofthesky.com, or write him at P.O. Box 148, Cochran, Ga. 31014.).