Hiking Lessons

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

Where did the summer go? I am gratefully a world away from the desolation of Maine, but I want to summarize some learnings from that trip before I share the exciting New! Thing! Jesus is doing.

God is in all things. He reveals something of Himself in all our life experiences, and in fact, we can redeem all of them by seeking and finding Him in them. Every piece of art communicates something of the artist. We can understand something of “God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature” by studying His creation. We grasp better His vastness and power by meditating on the ocean, His faithfulness from the lifelong monogamy of cardinals, His majesty and steadiness from epic, snow-capped peaks.

I made it up to Acadia National Park four times in my four weeks in Maine. Aside from continuing to witness that people can and do make a life doing all kinds of things in all kinds of places (stopped behind a USPS truck in Bar Harbor on a hot-blue, cut-grass summer day, I wondered whether being a mail person in such climes would be so bad), I was absorbed by gleefully investigating my ever-present question (“Where does that go?”) to my heart’s content and finding God in hiking.

Your word is a lamp to my feet
And a light to my path.

Psalm 119:105

I have a somewhat sacrilegious association with this verse, but it’s so effective and visceral. Asking forgiveness in advance. It brings to my mind walking through a pitch-black campsite with a flashlight in the early hours, looking for a suitable, um, place. The distinction between dark and light is stark; you can hear the crunch of gravel and whisper of spruce and aspen around you; the damp earth is pine-pungent in your nose—but your vision is very much limited to your ring of light. It’s just like God’s leading: most of the time, you can only see a few steps ahead at a time. And getting moving is a prerequisite for getting farther with any kind of clarity! Bends, twists, and trees will often obscure your trail, and sometimes you have to pause and really look hard to find the next marker on bark or stone, but you can trust that as you go, the next steps will become clear.

And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

2 Corinthians 3:18

My last trip up was to hike Penobscot and Sargent Mountains. We started out eager, my black pointer-mix bounding up the granite ahead of me, but it was unexpectedly hot. With too little water on hand, we bailed on Sargent and meandered up Penobscot, giving more time to contemplate deep things of the Lord. As we stopped often to rest and take photos at lookouts, I noticed each time I would think we were near the top—nearer than we really were. We’d walk further and, almost unbelievably, the view would become even more gorgeous. I’d look up the trail and—even when we were past the tree line—think there was only a little more to go. And yet, time after time, as we went higher and higher, there was more beauty—and more trail.

What a fitting description of our journeys with God! Always, there is more of Him to know, always greater heights of knowledge, greater depths of experience, always “ever-increasing glory”. Always more of our hearts to be transformed “into His likeness”. The phenomenon of being too small on the bald rock face to see the edges, to grasp the height or the width of it—and the tendency to think I’d made it—humbled me and encouraged a reordering in my heart of my finite capacity and our Father God’s generous expansiveness. And, in it, I felt the invitation CS Lewis writes of in The Last Battle: to ‘come further up, come further in!’