A little over a year ago, a dangerous snowboarding accident ended Laura’s season just as it began. With at least eleven broken bones in her back, her recovery progressed at an agonizing pace. We recorded her improvement over the course of weeks and months rather than days. Honestly, at times I wondered if she’d ever heal completely, and I doubted she’d strap on her board to tear up the slopes again.

Saturday I spent the entire day with her. (Yep, that’s her beautiful mug up there.) Somewhere in between cups of tea, I asked a simple question, but one that’s been teasing my curiosity:

“Have you been snow boarding this season?”

“Yes. Twice.” She replied matter-of-fact, as if any other answer would be an impossibility.

“How did it go?” I imagined her a shaking Israelite at the top of her first post-accident run, intimidated by a Goliath mountain and the risk of another fall. After an excruciating injury and lengthy recovery, a fair amount of fear would be understandable.

“It was great. No problem.”

Our conversation went on to hundreds of other things on Saturday. Only twenty or thirty seconds were allotted to revisiting last year’s pain. It’s as if she’s picked herself up off the ground, brushed off the memory and kept moving forward. She’s a fearless David who took a slingshot to a giant and brought it down. She’ll never forget the day she fell nor the obstacles she had to overcome to recover. But Goliath isn’t in charge of her future.

Whether your Goliath is a past failure, a festering wound, fear about tomorrow, or a mountain that nearly killed you, sometimes you simply have to stand up, shake it off and keep living.

There’s still a lot of mountain to cover.