How We Are All Connected: Navigators. Glen Eyrie. My Mother. Me. My Sons.

It’s a loose story.

One that I cannot confirm the extra details to dot the i’s or cross the t’s, but it’s a true story, nonetheless.

When my mother was younger, post high school I think, she was involved with a group called the Navigators.  Some sort of cross between a Young Life and a Campus Crusade ministry.  It’s the organization she credited with helping her to find and to know Jesus. It formed her, spiritually. Shaped her and moved her along the course that she would follow. The course that would make her the sort of mother she was. The sort of wife she was. The sort of human she was.

Although in her later life, she would not be very active with the organization any longer, she held the Navigators and their mission dear to her. She spoke of them with respect and appreciation. I knew their name.

And she grew up. And so did I. She had children and raised them to adulthood. And I am doing the same.

For the past two summers, on our long drive out to Colorado, we have stayed at a conference center in Colorado Springs called Glen Eyrie.

Guess whose headquarters are located at Glen Eyrie?

The Navigators.

This past year we spent a little more time there than the year before. We received a guided tour. We learned some more of the history of Glen Eyrie.

And on that tour, we learned about the man who started the Navigators, Dawson Trotman, and his wife Lila. About their lifelong efforts to teach people about God and to help others.  About their love for this teaching. About the way they started small and traveled around the world to share the good news they felt people needed to know.

That good news, of course, through their work, reached my own momma’s ears and changed her life – and changed mine too.

Ripples upon ripples.

The calling of the Maker to His creation. 

During our stay, the boys and I hiked up a small path to an overlook. A small clearing where the beautiful campus of Glen Eyrie – and the the gorgeous backdrop of Colorado Springs – could be seen and we could marvel at the view.

Right there, atop that clearing, on a small ridge, both Dawson Trotman and his wife Lila are buried.

I don’t know them. I never did. I never will. To my knowledge, my mother never met them either. But because of their faith and their vision, my mom knows Jesus. And I do too.

I sat still up there with my sons. I held their hands and told them the parts of this story that I did know. I told them about the wonder and the awe and the can’t-even-comprehend-it kindness of a God who lets lives matter so much – for so long. I thought about the circles, the ripples, the ways in which one life passes into another, one heart cries out to another, one decision trickles down through time to influence so many other decisions. The power we get to have with our words and our lives. The results of which we will likely never live to see.

How much it all matters.

How Dawson and Lila Trotman’s legacy is intermingled with Irlanda Norton’s legacy and Bergen Keigley’s legacy. 

How just us standing on that edge in the incredible Colorado air is mixed up with all the other lives who have done the exact same thing.

It’s a wonder, too lofty for us to realize.

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