A stranger in a black SUV picked me up from the tiny airport in Durango, Colorado the summer after my freshman year of college. I had signed up to be a camp counselor in the mountains, my first time in the role and the first time I could remember living outside of the flat Midwest. From the get go, I was hooked.

I loved waking up near the colorful peaks of the San Juan Mountains, including Engineer Mountain, which would end up being the first mountain I ever summited.

But before we started climbing mountains on the weekends for fun in between hosting groups of campers, we talked as a staff about our lives, our faith journeys, and difficult things we had or were currently walking through.

At the ripe old age of 18, I was navigating my parents’ choice to divorce that summer. The pain felt too raw, too fresh to originally share much outside of the general facts and timeline. At the time, I didn’t pick up on the juxtaposition of navigating one of my first seasons of spiritual wilderness while camping out in the woods and mountains of Colorado. Looking back, though, experiencing the Lord’s nearness in unexpected ways that summer warms my heart.

One of the activities we led our campers in was a simulated “solo” hike, where we had the whole group hike together on a long trail, but spread out 10-20 feet between people, so they could feel like they were hiking alone while remaining safely in our care and under our watch. We invited campers to ask the Lord for a sign that He was with them, and that He loved them. It could be anything, and our campers often surprised us with what they revealed had spoken to their hearts, such as the bee sting one young girl interpreted as a reminder that the Lord would never leave her!

For me, it was the tiny, delicate purple wildflowers alongside the dirt trails that whispered reminders that God loved me and was close to me, even while I felt like I had no idea what I was doing out in the middle of Colorado with dozens of strangers and kids I was supposed to help spiritually mentor.

Little did I know that a simple purple wildflower would become a motif of God’s reassurance well into my adult life. I can’t count the moments I’ve been out on a walk to clear my head, spirits low while I worked through a struggle, and I’ve suddenly seen just one purple flower in the middle of a group of weeds or a stretch of sidewalk with no other signs of life.

In fact, that summer in Durango, when we did eventually climb Engineer, and I had my first literal mountaintop experience, I found a tiny purple flower in the middle of a blank, icy peak that moved me to tears (and accessorized my tiny snowwoman).

In that moment, after scrambling up loose rock for hours and fearing that one misplaced step would tumble both me and my giant backpack over the nearly 13,000 foot edge, as I looked out higher above the world than I had ever been, noticing that tiny purple flower filled my heart with an overwhelming sense of God’s goodness, a knowing I’ve loved carrying with me back to the flat Midwest.

So as I started thinking about this website, this community, that I wanted to build, that image of searching for these “wildflowers”, these signs of God’s presence and love even in the barren wilderness, immediately came to mind. Alongside that came the feeling that we are all wildflowers- made in the image of a loving God, planted in the wilderness of this earth to be reminders of His love to those searching for it.

That summer im Durango, one of my campers was also walking through her parents’ divorce. I realized through the wisdom of older staff around me that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a coincidence that she had been placed in my group. I didn’t have any answers or feel-good theology for her, but I did understand what she was going through, and I think we both found comfort in knowing we were not alone, and that God wasn’t done writing our stories.

Through this collection of stories here at Searching for Wildflowers, I hope that you’re encouraged to search for your own wildflowers, both the reminders and the fellow people around you.

May we grow together in the wildest of ways and places.