Reliance

Well, as you may have heard, I recently finished a my first draft of a fantasy novel.  I started it in 2008, by my best estimate, worked on it through college and the first year of my post-college life, and now, five years later, I have the complete manuscript.  I'm still going to edit it after letting it sit a while and getting some feedback, but now that it's finished I feel like I've cleared the biggest hurdle.  More than that, I got a call last night from my first satisfied reader, who loved the book and--as I told him--had a significant role in shaping it with his feedback.  I'm very grateful to him and very happy that the book is finished.

But I admit there was another reason I was so happy to finish the book.  Coming back up here to the YMCA at Snow Mountain Ranch brought back a lot of good memories for me.  In 2010 I came up here with the Navigators (a Christian college ministry) for the summer.  I vividly remember tramping and biking around the trails, meeting God in the woods and talking to Him.  This was the place where I wrote my first prayer journals.  This is the place where conversing with God became natural.  This is the place where I fell in love, both deepening my love for God and realizing His love for me.  I admit that returning here was not my first choice, but one thing I was looking forward to was new encounters with God, further deepening our relationship in the place that was so important to us three summers back.  To put it simply, I wanted a God-date: a time I could be alone with Him for a while and get to know Him better.  I prayed about this desire, and He answered, Finish your book, and then we can have our date.

Well, Friday I finished the book.  Over the weekend I had two 3AM shifts and I spent Monday recovering and unwinding.  Today was my last day off.  God left the choice of the date up to me.  I thought about it and realized that all the best God-dates I'd had before were adventures, so I asked for one of those.  Today, the adventure came, though I'm not sure it was exactly what I thought it would be.  I found, at about 3 o'clock that I needed some more money to finish my laundry.  I also needed a new swimsuit (the old one doesn't fit--this is what I get for trying to wear things from high school).  I knew of only one place where I might get both: Winter Park.  I remembered taking a day to ride to Winter Park and back once in 2010, so I knew it was possible.  This is your date, God said, so I took my bike and set out.

The first thing that struck me was that whenever anyone sets out on an adventure, they have to count on God to bring them back from it.  Really, every single day we live at the risk of dying.  You could have a heart attack while you read this.  You could develop cancer as you sit comfortably in your home.  There is, ultimately, nothing you can do about this: only God is keeping these things and a myriad of others from killing you at any given time.  The thing is, when we're surrounded by our familiar homes, friends, and work, the risks and the need to rely on God to sustain us doesn't occur to us.  But out on a mountain trail, barreling down a hill at what felt like thirty miles per hour, swerving to follow the trail, the possibility of death or disaster was something I couldn't ignore.  At any moment, I could hit a hidden rock and go flying into a tree, startle a sunning snake and get bitten, take a turn to fast and go careening of the trail...the only thing between me and disaster was God.  There on the trail, my faith was real, immediate.  "My God will sustain me," I told myself.

It was a pleasant enough ride to Winter Park.  I completed my errands and started back.  Up through Tabernash (about the halfway point).  Then, I began to have trouble with hills that shouldn't be giving me that much of a challenge.  I realized I had bit off more than I could chew by taking on a ride I could only remember being arduous in 2010 (after I'd been riding frequently at this elevation, and almost daily for two years in Fort Collins).  I did not realize it at the time, but what I'd taken on was a roughly thirty mile round trip at 8,000 feet, with about a 300 ft elevation gain on either end, and I hadn't been on my bike in over a year.  To get back after dark, I had to complete the entire ride in less than five hours.  It quickly became apparent that I was not going to make it.  Even normal riding in a low gear caused by legs to ache.  Just one stroke on a hill was agony.  I would have to walk up the hills (and there were lots of them), and when I went downhill I would have the sun in my eyes, blinding me to potentially dangerous turns.  I couldn't do it.

But God urged me to finish the trail.  I remembered the verse from Isaiah 40: "He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.  Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall; but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up on wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint."  I prayed for strength again and again on that trail.  As walking uphill became difficult, I told myself, "The God who makes mountain goats and leads them through the wilderness will get me up this hill."

There were plenty of times when I was exhausted and ready to give up, but I made it back in one piece just as the sun was going down.  I exhausted my own strength, pushed myself beyond my endurance, but God endured and I got through by relying on Him.

Now, in my room, I think back to my sister's graduation.  One of the valedictorians gave a speech there congratulating the graduates on all the hard work they'd done to get this far and emphasizing that it was because of their work that they were seated there that day to receive their degrees.  Reliance on self was the big theme I remember from that speech.  It's also a huge theme in our culture.  Books are filled with it.  Even beyond the realm of self-help books that teach you to "look inside" for strength to rely on, there are fiction and fantasy books where the hero manages to save the day by tapping some hidden reserve of his own powers.  But I had no power of my own to finish that ride.  Lately I've been reading a book called Dangerous Faith which is a collection of non-fiction stories of Christians in harrowing circumstances: a man battling cancer and hunting one of the most dangerous animals in Africa (cape buffalo actually, large herbivores are surprisingly testy and the cape buffalo gores over 200 people a year), a man losing his eye and nearly his life on a Himalayan peak, a group of missionaries surviving an airplane crash in the frigid Bering Sea (where no crash victims had every been rescued alive before), a missionary to an isolated tribe in the jungle being captured and tortured by Colombian rebels, a woman surviving the 9/11 attack on the Pentegon and the man who rescued her...the list goes on.  What all of these situations have in common is that these people realized, at a desperate moment, that they did not have the power to make it out of the situation themselves.  They had to rely on God.

In the end, who is it safer to rely on: ourselves with our flaws and frailties, or a tireless God who made and knows everything?  For me, it is God, and my God will sustain me through whatever adventures lie ahead.