I love going on little “trips”. I’m a person who doesn’t really like to get caught up inside all
the time. I especially enjoy going to
places where I haven’t been in a long time. This past Saturday Jamitha and I embarked on a little “trip” that we had
been planning for a little over a week. It was quite the event for us. For nearly the entire week leading up to our outing we could not stop
discussing the details. Needless to
say, we had an almost child-like giddiness about the whole affair. The destination: Old Man’s Cave. If you
grew up and attended school in or around Meigs County then there’s a strong
chance that you took a school field trip to Old Man’s Cave. It was in this fashion that I first
encountered this beautiful juggernaut of nature. Yet my initial visit to Old Man’s Cave was probably a little more
than fifteen years ago so you can consider it safe to say that my explicit
memory of the entire location has been somewhat dulled by time. Jamitha’s visit was within the past decade
so she tends to remember things a little better than I (this is also a rule of
thumb for just about everything…my senior moments are already starting to kick
in). However, all the memories we
collectively have of this locale are very endearing. We were nearly beside ourselves when we went to Wal-Mart on
Friday to get supplies such as the nature hiking essentials of Snack Packs
(chocolate chip cookie dough flavor), Ritz chips (which if you haven’t tried
you need to get yourself to a store ASAP and pick some up), and Capri-Suns (or
as I call them, “Heaven in a Silver Packet”). The Rutland Department Store supplied our lunchmeat. Ma and Pa Willford generously loaned us the
usage of an Igloo Xtreme cooler that will, by the way, keep ice in it’s icy
form for up to sixteen hours in a 250 degree heat wave. We were stocked, locked and ready to roll by
the time Saturday morning rolled around.
We arrived at Old Man’s Cave right around 12:15 P.M. We broke out a picnic blanket, got out the
cooler and enjoyed a killer lunch before hitting the trails. After a visit to the little boys and girls
rooms we hit up the ranger station for a trail map and we were off. Now here I have a small confession to
make. I had no idea that Old Man’s Cave
was merely one part of a bigger entity called the “Hocking Hills State
Park”. I also had no idea there was
something like six or so odd miles of trail that you could walk around the
entire park. The six miles part was
something I didn’t discover until well into our hike. We started our walk around 1:15 P.M. or so. We headed to the Lower Falls section of Old
Man’s Cave first. From there we saw a
sign that said “Cedar Falls”. I said,
“Oh honey let’s walk there and see more pretty waterfalls.” This was but one of the many stupid things I
would say this day. She said, “Ok,” and
we were blazing the trail towards what I believed to be the not very far away
Cedar Falls. One of the best parts
about Old Man’s Cave is going on all the “No Trail” paths. So naturally Jamitha and I are hitting a
bunch of side paths on our swath to Cedar Falls. Finally, at roughly 3:30 P.M. Jamitha and I see a sign that says
1 mi. to Cedar Falls. We were both
like, “Huh?” We’d been walking for
nearly two hours, not a straight path mind you but still, and we had yet
another mile to go before we hit our destination. We decided, silently I think, at that point to try and stick a
little more to the path and make up some ground to the falls. Probably some time between 4 and 4:30 P.M.
we arrived at Cedar falls. We rested
only for a short while and decided not to walk back the way we came. We instead decided to take the three-mile
route back to Old Man’s Cave. The upper
rim trail that we followed back to our car was, in many ways, a much easier
road. The only real obstacle on this
high road trail was hills. It was here
that I had an encounter with a telegram from God. Jamitha and I were walking a strong steady pace in order to make
good time back to the car when we passed a gentleman who looked like he might just
live in these hills. If it weren’t for
the fanny pack bouncing on his hip I would have officially declared him a
rugged mountain man. He was tall and
thin. He wore very sturdy hiking boots,
navy colored shorts that hit him about mid-thigh, a white t-shirt, glasses, and
a navy colored baseball cap. He had a
bushy gray beard and tufts of his gray hair struggled to get out from
underneath his cap. As he passed us he
smiled and asked, “Was it worth it?” Jamitha and I must have looked worn down because there was a subtle
chuckle underneath his question that almost seemed to say, “You guys looked
beat.” Granted, we were beat. After nearly five hours of climbing these
hills we were both very ready to sit down and take a load off. Regardless of all that, we were both having
this incredibly great time together so we didn’t really emphasize to ourselves
how tired we were, only that we had had this amazing day with one another. So I smiled back and heartily responded to
his question, “Oh yeah, it was well worth it.” Then something rather akin to déjà vu happened. Jamitha and I had walked probably a solid
half-mile or so when we passed a group of people. Within this group was a young woman. She startled me with this question: “Was it worth it?” In
that moment I simply blurted out my reflex response of, “Yeah, it was well
worth it.” It wasn’t until I had walked
about another hundred feet that my startled feeling really got a hold of me. I remember thinking to myself, “How
odd. Two completely different people,
at quite an interval apart in terms of space, but in near succession of one
another in the scope of time, asked me the exact same question. What are the odds of that?” Now I’m no mathematician (here I expect a
mathematical response from 100 ft. Mike) but such a sequence of identical
questions just didn’t seem very probable to me. However some might say that it only makes perfect sense because
everyone knows that the trail is incredibly long and it only stands to reason
that others walking it would want to know if they are wasting their time in a
rather un-scenic and pointless endeavor. To me, however, this was no chance encounter of strong or flimsy
mathematical odds. Let me explain why.
Earlier that week I had finished reading “Mere Christianity”
by C.S. Lewis. I learned a great deal
from this book that helped to highlight many of the finer points of
understanding scripture. One of these
lessons was about the trouble of “self”. I’m still planning another post about this very lesson but I’m as yet in
the process of piecing together my thought. I actually sat down on Friday night and typed out a full page for this
article, which I had entitled “Dining With the Enemy”. As I typed, something just felt out of
place. As I finished the last paragraph
on the page I felt God say to me, “This isn’t what you want to say. Scrap it.” I was momentarily taken aback because this was a full page worth of work
and I hate to just trash the start of what might have been a decent
thought. However, God was very
insistent with me in that moment as I heard again, “Just get rid of it. It’s not what I want you to say.” So I reluctantly highlighted the entire
selection and hit delete. But I wasn’t
bothered by that because I believe that when you begin to understand what it
means to actually trust God then you understand that your will and your passion
doesn’t always run concurrent to the passion or will of God. I think it is always of extreme importance
for us to keep in mind that God is busy “perfecting” us all our lives. It is necessary for us to stop, listen and
discern what it is God wants from us or perhaps what God is trying to tell
us.
Flash forward in time to my hundred-foot walk past the young
woman who had asked the déjà vu question, “Was it worth it?” For days I had been contemplating the idea
of choice and how it is both the greatest gift as well the greatest curse of
humanity. Every day we are faced with
choice. Virtually every second of our
lives is about choice. It is perhaps
the most commonly exercised thing that we humans have. Yet as often as we exercise it, it doesn’t
mean we really know how to use it in an advantageous way. I think back over the vast chronicles of
ignorant choices in my life to be reminded that I’ve spent most of my life
abusing choice. How ironic is it that
choice is both the very thing that helps me serve God as well turn from
Him. What a massive responsibility we
each have as carriers of this infection called choice. Choice can either be a bad infection or a
good infection. At the risk of sounding
trite I’m going to say that there is but one vaccine for the “bad choice
infection” disease. That cure is simply
God. Now that I’ve made myself sound
like a televangelist I want to try and redeem myself by saying that we simply
don’t know how to handle choice. I
believe each of us would acknowledge that there is at least one thing in our
lives that we know, no matter how much effort or study we put into it, we will
just never be good at doing. For me
such an example would be math. In all
of our spiritual senses, however, none of us will ever be good at choice. It just isn’t going to happen. We need help in that regard. We need a driver because we only run
ourselves into guardrails when we try to drive ourselves through the fog laden
back roads of choice. The only smart
choices are the ones made under the will and supervision of God. Everything else is just a blind human guess
with a poor seek to success ratio. Sure
sometimes we might hit the nail right on the head but most of the time we’re
just going to whack ourselves on the thumb. Again my mind reels back to experiences where I have to ask myself the
question, “Was it worth it?” To many of
these experiences I can repulsively say, “Hell no it wasn’t worth it,” only to
stop and remember this: Our choices
help to both define us and lead us. Trek back over your life and imagine, for the moment, that you could
remove the most difficult year of your life. After having done that ask yourself this very integral question: Would I be the same person without that
year?
Here is a cold, hard, fast truth: None of us can look back over the catalogue of our choices and
say that every moment of decision was a laudable one. Yet, as the old adage says, what is done cannot be undone. However, this does not mean that we should
spend the rest of our lives in Christ kicking ourselves over crossed bridges
that we cannot return to in order to make drastic corrective alterations. If we were to fall into such a trap we would
spend our whole lives recounting a mediocre existence instead of passionately
praising the one who gave us any existence at all. Was it worth it? This
life has been worth it for one reason: God. I would rather never have
been born if it meant that I had to go through this whole life never knowing
Christ. However, I was given life, made
a lot of really crap choices, and despite all my own inadequacies God still
sought me, broke me down, and built me back up again. Why did He do that? It
doesn’t make sense to a “logical” mind because it somehow defies what we have
come to define as good sense. Yet
despite that, God made the choice to go ahead with each and every one of our
lives. He made the choice to stick with
us. He made the choice to save us. He made the choice to seek after us all our
lives. He made the choice to be our
Father. He made the choice to take
responsibility for His creation. He
understood perfectly where His choices would bring Him and He did it just the
same. And He didn’t just do it because
He could. He did it because He
understood His choices. He knew what we
would need. He knew what we would feel. He knew how we might treat Him. He knew He would be despised as well as
loved by those He had crafted with His own hands. In a way it almost seems reckless but for those who believe, does
it seem so reckless to you? Our lives
are made “worth it” because God filled them with worth. Our little sojourn through the world may
sometimes be tiresome and even seemingly cumbersome to endure but this is only
true if we are trudging along with our feet stuck deep in our own sense of
reality. There are many realities for
sale these days. You see them
everywhere. Go through any grocery
store line and you’ll see eight different realities on the market tailored
especially for you (whatever that means). Go through any bookstores bestseller list and you’ll see them festering
with the latest cure for the “life blues”. Everyone is searching for something. Everyone is searching for a reality to call their own. Everyone is like a junkie looking for fix
and in their search they find one of two things: Either band-aids or actual cures. Many will never find anything that really heals the wounds they
seek to mend. This is what I mean by
finding “band-aids”. Yet God is the
only steadfast cure that has never, and will never be, diminished. That is why our road will always be worth
treading.
God fixes us. But
why? I believe it is because God
believed in some part of us that is somehow blind to our own eyes. In other words, He believed we were worth
it. Of course I’m not claiming here
that I believe I have seen the full breadth of God’s perspective for creation
but I think there is something in scripture that breathes this very sentiment
of worth. God wanted us. Sometimes we look at God as this very
distant father figure sitting atop an ivory white throne looking down through
the miles at His creation in either quiet satisfaction or thundering
disgust. Yet what if God were that
shabbily dressed guy in the next town that everyone claimed was some kind of
wise individual or even some silly religious lunatic. What if the spirit of God was that thing inside you making the
machine of your life turn in the sequence He knew was best. What if all that had been in your life was,
as H.G. Wells once said, “…the dream before the awakening.” What if God were like the hero in some
classical work of romantic fiction who loved us so strongly, lived His promise
to us rather than just discussed it, who fought for us, who died for us, and
lived on inside of us in Spirit while constantly feeding us life from the
inside. That’s no distant picture of
God nor do I believe that scripture ever paints God as a distant character somehow
on the fringes of the bigger story. God
isn’t seated eons away from anything you could ever touch. He is, and always has been, right where you
could find Him. God is no Houdini nor
does He try to be. God simply is only
what He’s always been with us. He’s
never been anything different. God is
the best part of us. Long and
tirelessly He has struggled for us.
In other words, He believed we were worth it.
May our eyes never be blind to this unwavering fact: This existence was worth knowing because our
existence was, is and always will be, God.
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