Remember the famous story Jesus told about the two sons?  Jesus never mentions that the reason the younger son wanted his inheritance early so he could leave and squander it was due to any failure on the father’s part.  Whew, I think.  Maybe I should let myself off the guilt hook.  And yet as I watch him live out his life in ‘the far country’ I ache for him to love and know the Jesus I know.  I search my memories for where I failed him as a father and pastor.  How did he drift so far?

I am running a low-grade fever of sadness while he is prodigalizing in Portlandia.

As I sit here looking out at the Sound and see large gulls soaring on thermals over the water, I am seeing other faces that make my heart grow sad.  Not children of mine.  I see faces of congregants; people who are trying so hard to find their way in this world without Jesus.  Oh, they come to church.  Some come regularly, some intermittently but they are in my flock and I am their shepherd.  And while I am delighted with our church family and I am at peace with Jesus, I am also very aware that my sense of melancholy is tied to the saddest member of my church.

I am careful about boundaries.  I am quite willing to let people feel the full weight of the consequences of their sins.  These consequences can be their best tutors.  But, oh this weight, this cloud, this dull and throbbing ache for the people for whom I have been given charge is relentless.

Matthew tells us that Jesus felt this heaviness, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36)

The Apostle Paul commands all Christians to, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”  (Galatians 6:4)

I wonder if this sadness is part of bearing the burden.  I wonder if in bearing we are more present.  I wonder if being more present with them leaves open the opportunity to run to them when they “come to themselves” and realize all that is waiting for them in the Father’s house.  I believe this sadness keeps a father on the front porch looking down a long and dusty road for a broken and sad boy to come walking home.  And when he sees the familiar stride of his child, to be quick to leap off the porch and run down the road to embrace his son.  And it is this sadness that makes a pastor stand on the porch of a little church every Sunday morning looking at a parking lot for that troubled family to drive up.

So, I wait and watch—ready to run to both my son and you.

For I am a pastor.

1.     The Pastor: A Memoir by Eugene Peterson.

Few books have moved me at a visceral level as this book.  I admire Peterson for his honesty and humanness in writing this book.  His analogy of the similarities between his father as a butcher and how that prepared him to be a pastor is compelling.  And the story of his first convert to Christianity in grade school left me laughing on the floor.  If I had my way I would make this required reading for all pastors.  The book made me proud of my profession.  I am a pastor.

The Pastor steers away from abstractions, offering instead a beautiful rendering of a life tied to the physical world—the land, the holy space, the people—shaping Peterson’s pastoral vocation as well as his faith. He takes on church marketing, mega pastors, and the church’s too-cozy relationship to American glitz and consumerism to present a simple, faith-filled job description of what being a pastor means today. In the end, Peterson discovered that being a pastor boiled down to “paying attention and calling attention to ‘what is going on right now’ between men and women, with each other and with God.” The Pastor is destined to become a classic.

2. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Mataxas

I kept telling my wife as I was reading this book, “But I don’t want Dietrich to die.” A definitive, deeply moving narrative, Bonhoeffer is a story of moral courage in the face of the monstrous evil that was Nazism.

After discovering the fire of true faith in a Harlem church, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany and became one of the first to speak out against Hitler. As a double-agent, he joined the plot to assassinate the Fuhrer, and was hanged in Flossenberg concentration camp at age 39. Since his death, Bonhoeffer has grown to be one of the most fascinating, complex figures of the 20th century.

3. Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation, by Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken

This book articulated what I have been feeling for years about the current state of the attractional model of Church in our culture.  I found it compelling and courageous.  Its the story of how God took a thriving, consumer-oriented church and transformed it into a modest congregation of unformed believers committed to the growth of the spirit–even when it meant a decline in numbers.

As Kent and Mike found out, a decade of major change is not easy on a church. Oak Hills Church, from the pastoral staff to the congregation, had to confront addiction to personal ambition, resist consumerism and reorient their lives around the teachings of Jesus. Their renewed focus on spiritual formation over numerical growth triggered major changes in the content of their sermons, the tenor of their worship services, and the reason for their outreach. They lost members. But the health and spiritual depth of their church today is a testimony of God’s transforming work and enduring faithfulness to the people he loves. Honest and humble, this is Kent and Mike’s story of a church they love, written to inspire and challenge other churches to let God rewrite their stories as well.

4. Whole Life Transformation: Becoming the Change Your Church Needs, by Keith Meyer

I loved this book so much that I bought six hard back copies and gave them to the young leaders of our church and have been meeting at 6:00AM on Saturday mornings to work our way through it.

2011 Golden Canon Leadership Book Award winner! Ministry to others and growing the church were the center of Keith Meyer’s life. And yet he was arguing with his wife about how many nights a week he was spending in meetings. His temper was short, and he was exhausted. Keith writes: “I can see that I was pursuing a twisted idea of ‘success’–not in the secular forms I regularly preached against, but in the sanctified activism and workaholism sometimes called ‘professional ministry.’

A growing church, defined mostly by higher attendance at church services, more and more programs, and bigger budgets and buildings were the marks of a successful ministry in the clergy circles I ran with at that time.” In the midst of his pain Keith discovered a new way of living–one that truly depended on Christ to redeem and reform his character. And then as he was transformed, he discovered that the change in him was changing the way that he was pastoring and leading others. Drawing from the riches of church history and the experience of contemporary ministry, Keith Meyer writes with the voice of a prophet and the heart of a pastor. If you’re ready to stop trying to follow Christ and start training to be a Christ follower, this is the book for you.

5. Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead.

Novels are where deep truth are found.  Well turned phrases help me write better sermons.  The drama and tension in a novel make me a better story teller.  All of these are excellent reasons to read fiction.  This book is language at its best.  Set in 1916, Far Bright Star follows Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, as he leads an expedition of inexperienced soldiers into the mountains of Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa and bring him to justice. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong and the patrol is brutally attacked. After witnessing the demise of his troops, Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert.

Through him we enter the conflicted mind of a warrior as he tries to survive against all odds, as he seeks to make sense of a lifetime of senseless wars and to reckon with the reasons a man would choose a life on the battlefield. Olmstead, an award-winning writer, uses his precise, descriptive prose to explore the endurance and fate of the last horse soldiers. The result is a tightly wound novel that is as moving as it is terrifying.

6. Outer Dark, by Cormac McCarthy

In my opinion this is the nation’s greatest living fiction writer.  He is an acquired taste, however.  He is brutal and violent.   But no one and I mean no one creates a sentence with such force and eloquence as McCarthy.  I read and re-read his works.

Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century.  A woman bears her brother’s child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes.  Discovering her brother’s lie, she sets forth alone to find her son.  Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

7. Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow

I love historical biography’s.  This one is one of the best.  I enjoy reading how men and women of history made decisions and handled stress and difficulties.  There is so much misinformation surrounding our first president that it is appalling at times.  This is a great book.

In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life of Washington, this crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian War, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as America’s first president.

8. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard

One of the saddest biographies I have read.  This is a little known and fascinating man who became president reluctantly.  James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back.

But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what hap­pened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in tur­moil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for power—over his administration, over the nation’s future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. As his condition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet.

9. The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows, by James Bryan Smith

This is a simple and yet very profound book on how our imaginings about God affect how we live out our lives on a day-by-day basis.  Our false narratives about God affect how we live.

“God wants me to try harder.” “God blesses me when I’m good and punishes me when I’m bad.” “God is angry with me.” We all have ideas that we tell ourselves about God and how he works in our lives. Some are true–but many are false. James Bryan Smith believes those thoughts determine not only who we are, but how we live. In fact, Smith declares, the most important thing about a person is what they think about God.

The path to spiritual transformation begins here. Turning to the Gospels, Smith invites you to put your ideas to the test to see if they match up with what Jesus himself reveals about God. Once you’ve discovered the truth in Scripture, Smith leads you through a process of spiritual formation that includes specific activities aimed at making these new narratives real in your body and soul as well as your mind.

10. Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey into the Human Heart,  by Lynn Schooler

I bought this book in Junuea while on a cruise this summer and finished before I got home.  I love the way this man writes.  It is a fascinating look at the way the wilderness can be a place of self-discovery during difficult times.

Lynn Schooler had recently lost a dear friend and was feeling his marriage slipping away from him when he set out on a daring journey-first by boat, then on foot-into the Alaskan wilderness to clear his head. His solo expedition, recounted in Walking Home, is filled with the awe and danger of being on one’s own in the wild, being battered by the elements and even, for two harrowing days, becoming the terrified quarry of a grizzly bear.

But the formidable, lonely landscape is also rich with human stories-of trappers, explorers, marooned sailors, and hermits, as well as the myths of the region’s Tlingit Indians. Relating his journey, Schooler creates a conversation between the human and the natural, the past and the present, to investigate-on a remote and uninhabited shore-what it means to be not only part of nature’s wild web, but also a member of a human community in the flow of history.

Well, there they are.  I certainly read more than these ten, but these affected my thinking or moved my heart in some pretty profound ways.

Restoring God’s world one heart at a time.

Why?  Because we have been uniquely equipped and called by God to do this.  We have the right experience as a congregation; we have the right passion as a people.  And we have shared values that we believe if all the people who live in our community would hold then restoration would begin.

Our Values…

•             Mending Brokenness

Bringing healing to the secret places of the soul where the facades of security, success, and significance we present to the world only succeed in imprisoning the person God intended us to be.

•             Deepening Faith

Presenting everyone mature in Christ, everybody complete, everybody whole, everybody just the way God designed them to be.   So that human lives can flourish as God intended them to flourish, so that the power of sin might lose its grip on humanity.

•             Strengthening Families

Preparing the next generation for the journey of life by understanding that life is not a series of random, arbitrary acts, but that we all are part of God’s epic story of conflict, victory, love, and restoration.

•             Pursuing Peace

Establishing (building, creating, developing, joining) God’s dream that all the people of the world are woven together into a beautiful, harmonious, interdependent, knitted and webbed relationship with each other and the physical world.

Going forward we will dig deep into these values.  We will protect these values.  We will filter everything we do in this church though those values.  If an activity does not move us closer to living out those values we will not do it.  We will live out those values as a church and as a individuals.

If I declare that to increase my health physical exercise will be a high value of mine, what evidence would you sees of that value?

How Will We Know We Are Hitting the Mark?

We will know when Sunday after Sunday we will see…

•             Wounded Healers

Wounded healers leave here ready and willing to speak words of grace and truth into the hearts of fragmented lives. Sometimes just to listen, sometimes to just pray, but we will be agents of healing.

•             Mature Believers

We will see Christ followers falling deeper and deeper in love with Jesus and see their Biblical wisdom in a steady growth trajectory up and to the right.  They will want to learn more, give more, love more, serve more all bring glory to the God who has saved them.

•             Strong Families

We will see families building their foundations on the life of Jesus, his teachings, and his example; a legacy of faithful dependence on Jesus that will set them apart in this world.

•             Peace Makers

We will send out peace makers into the community that are committed to advancing the Kingdom God.  What upsets God will upset us.  What burdens the heart of God will burden our hearts.  We will leave every Sunday so affected by the love of Jesus and so filled by the presence of the Holy Spirit that we will infect our community with God’s Shalom.  It will be an Immaculate Infection.

What is Our Long-range Strategy for Restoration?

Our strategy won’t be easy, but it should be relatively simple. We will provide three safe environments.

•             Worship

Since worship is a human response to a divine revelation and every time we gather as a group in Jesus name we know God will say something, then we must respond.  God says something and we respond to it; God does something, and we respond to it.  Sometimes it means we laugh and shout to the Lord.  Sometimes it means we applaud.  Sometimes it means we weep for the joy of grace; sometimes we weep for the sorrow of sin.  Sometimes we are loud.  Sometimes we are quiet.  But worship always requires a response. And whenever we respond to God, we are changed.

•             Growth Groups

We will meet in one-on-one and in little groups in homes, coffee houses, and a various other venues for the purpose of encouraging each other to keep running the race, to learn more about who Jesus is, comfort each other when life kicks us in the teeth, and to hold each other accountable when we want to drift away from Him.

•             Serving Teams

We will serve each other, we will serve our community and we will serve the world.  There are countless little things that we can do that will teach us humility and bring civility to this hostile world.

There are people who need our hands and feet to do for them what they can’t do for themselves.

There are causes we will be involved in because there are voiceless people who need someone will lift them up and make things right.  We will bring the Kingdom of God to bear in this world.  There are water wells to be dug, vitamins to distribute, micro-financing to offer and human trafficking to end.

We will serve the city for the sake of the city. 

God will be pleased when we join Him in this restoration covenant that is as ancient as Noah and the Ark.  Nothing pleases the Father more than to see His children join Him in bringing ‘Up There Down Here.’  We will join with the Father to make His dream come alive on this earth.

There are hearts that need to be restored to right relationship with God through Jesus.  There are marriages that need to be restored through deep community with other brothers and sisters in Christ.  There are families that need to be restored through wise counsel and life-coaching centered in the Bible.  There are leaders that need to be called and equipped to pass on to the next generation this mission and these values. There are wrongs in this society that need to be righted, that can only be righted if we burn with a righteous anger and then get up and do something about those wrongs.

For if the Gospel is not good news for everybody it is not good news for anybody.

One day the leaders in our community will come to us and say, “It is better for us that you are here.”  They will be glad that there is a group of people so committed to personal and social restoration.

And the scripture will be true about us that says, “When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices…”  Proverbs 11:10

Let’s do this.

People are friendlier, they talk to each other, people in line at grocery stores realize they don’t have to be strangers and they strike up conversations.  They act as if they might could possibly be friends.

Neighbors bake banana loaf bread and take it to each other and wish good cheer.  They complement each other on how festive and elegant the decorations are on each other’s houses.

People are more generous this time of year.  Charitable organizations always count on the benevolence of people at this time of the year unlike any other to sustain their organizations.  People want to give gifts at this time of the year.  Tips are greater.  It just feels good to give.

I went to my favorite Starbucks this last week and ordered my usual “tall, bold and black drip” coffee and the cashier said that it was free.  I said that is so cool.  She said yes someone earlier had donated a gift card to buy the person following a free coffee.  She said that some people are donating money to reload the card to keep it going.  That is so cool, I said.  I never carry cash in my wallet.  But I looked to see…  That $1.80 cup of coffee ended up costing me $15.00!

People are more generous this time of year.

We open ourselves up to joy at this time of year.  We decorate stuff, bake stuff, eat stuff, —we play old Christmas Carols.  People who never sing at any other time of the year find themselves singing at Christmas.

We watch sentimental movies like Holiday Inn, It’s a Wonderful Life, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

We cherish rituals and traditions.

People get kinder at Christmas.  Old grudges are set aside.  People who are standoffish find themselves moving closer to people.  Cold and distant people find themselves getting warmer and more accepting.

We have a way of remembering what is really important and what really matters this time of year.  We miss the people we have lost, and we treasure those we have this time of year.

All of this is part of this annual glow-fest in our culture that we call “The Spirit of Christmas.”

And it says something about human beings that we even want this.  That we want to think outside of ourselves and think of others to this great extent that we will brave mall traffic to buy that special gift for a weird uncle that we don’t really even like.

But this raises a question that was put most poignantly by the great theologian Elvis Pressley in a Christmas song that we play every year at our house when he asks, “Why can’t every day be like Christmas?”

The problem with the spirit of December 25th is December 26th.  It all stops.  It never lasts.

A famous incident from WWI illustrates the nature of the Christmas season very well. It was December 1914, the first Christmas of the war. Already the stalemate along the western front in France had begun to set in. British, French and German troops faced each other in their lines of trenches. If you know anything about trench warfare, then you know it’s a nasty business: hastily dug holes in the ground about two yards deep topped with barbed wire.

Special periscopes were fixed at intervals along the front line trenches, because to stick your head above ground even for a second could easily be a fatal mistake. Artillery bombardment could come at any time, day or night, and the soldiers were in constant mortal danger, not only from enemy fire but also from the cold and disease that by the end of the war had caused more casualties than the enemy.

In between the trenches was no man’s land. It was littered with craters from artillery fire, providing a momentary safe haven for attacking troops and, later in the war, a place where the poison gas could pool and stagnate. It would be liberally strewn with barbed wire and bodies in various states of decay. If an attack was ordered, soldiers would have to go over the top through this quagmire. Many were cut down within yards of their own trenches by machine guns. That was trench warfare in the Great War.

But on Christmas Eve 1914, something strange happened. No orders were given by the commanding officers (in fact the British High Command hated the whole thing), but in Ypres in Belgium, German troops began placing candles decorating the few trees that still remained around their trenches. They sung Christmas carols, including Silent Night which was originally written in German. The English soldiers responded with their own carols.

The two sides continued shouting greetings to one another until there were invitations for visits across no man’s land. Small gifts were exchanged – whiskey, jam, chocolates. A joint funeral service was held in the middle of the battlefield, where Psalm 23 was read in English and German. In one spot a soccer game was played-–won 3-2 by the Germans, incidentally.

In one spot, a British captain climbed up on his parapet and fired three shots into the air. The German officer he had shared a beer with the previous day also rose from his trench, bowed his head to his counterpart and also fired three shots into the air. And, as the officer wrote at the time, the war was on again.  The generals and Prime ministers made certain that there was no Christmas truce the next year and for four more years they fought and killed 9 million men; a loss from which Europe has never fully recovered.

The spirit of Christmas says such wonderful things about the human heart, but it is so elusive.

Seems like such a simple thing that if we worked a little harder, if we just slowed down a little, if we just looked each other in the eye, if we just got a little more tolerant, if we were just a little kinder we could make it last.  But we have been trying a long time now and somehow we can’t.

Why can’t every day be like Christmas?

According to the writers of Scripture it is because in this world of beauty and loveliness we are plagued with a dark and sinister force called sin.

It was in those soldiers and it is in me and it is in you.  We can’t get rid of it.  We can’t educate it away, we can’t reform it away, we can’t pass laws and legislate it away, we can’t find a magic pill that makes it go away, and it is killing us.

And a sweet little holiday spirit doesn’t cut it. As author Stewart Briscoe once said, “The spirit of Christmas needs to be superseded by the Spirit of Christ.”  The spirit of Christmas is annual; the Spirit of Christ is eternal.  The spirit of Christmas is sentimental; the Spirit of Christ is supernatural.  The spirit of Christmas is a human product; the Spirit of Christ is a divine person. That makes all the difference in the world.

Jesus didn’t come to this earth to establish a holiday, but to bring His presence.  He came to this earth to teach us what life could be like and when He did that got Him into a lot of trouble with many people and He was placed on a cross when He was a young man and there He died.

And somehow on that cross all the darkness of sin broke itself on Him.  You see darkness does not overcome light.  Light always diminishes darkness.  He paid the debt of sin for us and died a death instead of us went to a grave and was raised on the third day.  And that is hope and good news for the human race.

And the last thing He ever said to His closest friends before He ascended to heaven was, “And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.”

Jesus promised that he would come and take up residence in our hearts.  His presence there will change the way you think, the way you feel, and the way you live.  And that is the hope of the world.

Doesn’t mean your life will be easy.  Doesn’t mean we will all live the perfect life or even be easy to understand at times.  But it is the only hope that this stumbling, bumbling and dying human beings have that is bigger than death.

If you were honest right now I wonder if you would want to invite Jesus to be a part of your life.  More than the warm glow at Christmas or at Easter; more than a holiday kind of faith; I wonder if you might be open to letting him move in and set up residence inside your heart and life.

Maybe you have lots of questions and you’re not sure about God and Jesus and if they are even real.  Before you decide that faith in Jesus is not for you do your due diligence.  Don’t trust the opinions of your parents, or your friends or popular culture.  YOU do your own homework and see if Jesus and His claims are real.

If our church could help you with that we would love to do that.  We will begin a new study in January called The Good and Beautiful Life where we will examine in depth the kind of life Jesus came of give.  I encourage you to come and study with us.

If another church would better fit your needs then I encourage you to find one and begin to understand what it means to follow Jesus.  There are many really good Churches in the area and I can recommend a couple to you if you want to send me an email.

But don’t keep kicking the faith can down the road year after year.

Maybe you would admit that you have a relationship with Jesus but for whatever reason, you have been holding Him at arm’s length.  You and He are not as close as you once were.

Maybe you would be honest enough to say that there are some things He may want to change about you and you are not sure you want Him to change those things.

But maybe this Christmas you are feeling a shift in your values a little and you are open to a closer relationship with Jesus and you would say, “Alright, Jesus I don’t know everything that this means, but deep down in my  heart, down where the knobs are, I want you to take control of my life.  I would like to be your follower, your student; I want to know you deeply.”

Maybe there is a deep wound and disappointment in your life.  Others are happy this time of year and are filled with joy and you smile on the outside, but on the inside you are wounded and hurting.  There is regret.  There is someone you miss.  There is an ache that won’t go away and is not getting filled.  There is a prayer that keeps going unanswered.

I cannot make you a promise that tomorrow will be easier than today.  But I can tell you that the ultimate hope for our world in its darkness…the only hope that is bigger than death…is Jesus.

Someone once told a Chinese woman all about Jesus for the first time and she began to weep.  Through her tears she said, “You know I always knew there ought to be someone like Him somewhere.  I just didn’t know His name.”

Jesus is his name.

That is why, I think, we are drawn to rituals and why holidays are vital to our health as a community.  I am remembering the song from the play Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye sings about this as the glue that holds families and communities together: Tradition!  Tradition!  Tradition!

I went to college out of state and my parents would not send me money to come home for Christmas.  Either they didn’t have it or they didn’t trust me with it.  Instead, they sent me a gas credit card; a Texaco card to be exact.  I always looked forward to mail from home when I was in college but there is nothing like getting a white envelope with a little note wrapped around a gas card that said, “Looking forward to seeing you, son.”  I remember running my fingertips over the raised numbers on that card and feeling a strong pull towards something warm, comforting, predictable, safe and reassuring…home.

I love hearing about Christmas traditions.  Our family growing up typically opened one gift on Christmas Eve, usually socks or underwear. One Christmas Eve, however, my brother and I got the board game Risk and we stayed up all night trying to capture and recapture Madagascar.  I don’t think I have played the game since.  My wife’s family always ate potato soup and hotdogs on Christmas Eve.

Today we pass one gift to one person in our family and then we all watch them open that gift to witness the joy of the perfect and deeply thoughtful gift.  Sometimes there is a puzzled look minus the joy.  Then, when enough joy has been witnessed and assimilated, greed takes over and someone shouts out, “Whose next?”

On our first Christmas together my wife went home to be with her family but I couldn’t get the time off from work so I had to stay out of state over Christmas.  Some friends let me spend Christmas with them and their family, but it wasn’t the same.  I remember how out of place I felt.  I was at someone’s home for this holiday, but not my home.  Nothing about it felt right.  Like the sun coming up in the west instead of the east, you are glad it came up, but you sure hope it goes back to normal tomorrow.

I wonder if you have ever felt like you were in the wrong place on Christmas.  Like maybe you should be home.  Maybe there could be a place for you to feel “at home.”  If you remember the story of Jesus’ birth it tells us that there was no room for him in the inn, so he had to be born in a stable and a manger.  He, too, was a long way from home on the first Christmas.  He was a long way from His second home, Nazareth and a long way from His first home, Heaven.

But Jesus always shows up where room is made for him.

Why not start a new “old” tradition this year?  If you have no place to celebrate the birth of Jesus, I invite you to come to our church for a brief candlelight celebration.  We will sing some traditional carols, hear the Christmas Story and enjoy gathering as a people who are certain that God knows our name and is waiting for us to come home.  Our service will be at 6:00 Christmas Eve at the corner of Prospect and 2nd in Old Town.

We will make room for you.

Humboldt Peak in the Sangre de Cristo Range in southern Colorado is 14,064’ high. It is the least challenging climb of the Crestone group of Fourteeners which include Crestone Peak, Crestone Needle, and Kit Carson Peak. Despite the rather impressive north face of Humboldt Peak, the standard route is considered an easy climb. It is not much more than a hike along a decent trail with some minor rock scrambling (Class 2) near the summit and is recommended for those just beginning to climb the Fourteeners.

My camp at upper South Colony Lake, elevation 12,000 feet, was surrounded by massive fourteen thousand foot peaks making the lake feel like a teaspoon of water cupped in the palm of God.  Not surprisingly the lake was frozen.  A skiff of fresh snow dusted the ground. The dry summer grass was brittle as broom straw under each booted step. It was quiet. No running water at the outlet. The birds were not singing. The pikas had grown quiet for the winter. The sound of my footfalls might have carried across the ice of the lake to echo against the cold granite face of Crestone Needle.  The camp stove clanged metallically as I pumped it, the sound foreign in this organic landscape. The thermometer dangling on my pack like a cheap earring said twenty-five degrees. I would have to break ice off the lake and melt it on the stove for cooking and drinking water.

My shelter was a gray tarp stretched in an A-frame using my trekking pole for support. This way I would be able to look out into the black night sky. The sun dropped behind Crestone Peak. As sunlight faded frigid air imposed itself with a heartless aggression. The thermometer read fifteen degrees. Dressed in all of my fleece clothing, I wormed my way into my twenty year old bag hoping it still had enough loft to keep me warm. I took my water bottle filled with heated water into the bag with me to help keep me warm and so I would have liquid water for breakfast in the morning. Finally, I lined my bag with an emergency reflector blanket to trap any escaping heat. When I turned onto my side to look out the open end of my lean-to, the silver shroud crinkled like cold cellophane.  But at last I was warm.

My breath hung before my face in a gauzy haze, blocking my view of the darkening sky. Breathing inside my bag for the added warmth also improved my ability to see the stars as they slowly brightened against the blackness of deep space. I stopped shivering and only my nose, still seeking air like a turtle under water, was cold. Stars shimmered now. Streaks of angel-hair light trailed behind a shooting star. The thin air at 12,000’ combined with the absence of ambient light caused the stars to pierce the darkness with laser-like intensity.  I think cold air magnifies and sharpens the starlight like shards of glass. I love night skies above tree line. They remind me of the depth of the universe and the immensity of a Creator-God who flung them into that ancient firmament.

The next morning the peaks were awash in the crimson alpine glow that gives these mountains their name. Warm light slid down the cliff-wall towards the lake and I decided to wait for its arrival at my camp before getting out of my comfortable cocoon. Breakfast was fast and hot. Coffee was bold and strong. I loaded my pack quickly and set it aside in some scrub willow brush. I packed emergency provisions in a day pack and headed up the shoulder of Humboldt.  The cold air burned my lungs as I pushed up the trail towards the saddle linking Humboldt with Playground of the Bears, a large five-acre parcel of flat ground connecting Kit Carson Peak with Crestone Peak. At the saddle I rested and enjoyed the view of the frozen lakes a thousand feet below. The power bar was too stiff to eat and I moved it to an interior pocket so my body temperature would soften it.

Rested, I set out for the next two thousand feet of gain on the ridge of the mountain. The wind began to blow up North Colony Canyon, so I had to climb leeward of the ridge in order to stay warm and to maintain my balance on the boulders. The wind must have hit thirty miles an hour with gusts blowing harder still. Craggy granite boulders tore at my wool gloves as I searched for handholds; the air was so cold it felt brittle.

The mountain is simple to climb. Just put one foot in front of the other. In some ways it is like working out on a stair climber. I remembered taking my oldest son, Cole, up this mountain when he was twelve and loved the way he described the mountain. He said, “It is like climbing a giant ant hill.” Maybe, but those ants were deep underground out of reach of this cold.

I tend to measure myself in life based on how I perform in the wilderness.  If I fail to accomplish a goal in the mountains I usually go back into the wild as soon as I can to flush my system of the failure. It is like a poison that needs to be purged. When, through arrogant leadership, I nearly caused a major emergency on Broken Hand, I came back to the same mountain a few weeks later to climb it and re-establish my dominance. Only that time when I got to the mountain I decided to do something even more difficult, climb Kit Carson Peak for the first time. After successfully summiting Kit Carson I walked by Broken Hand and said out loud, “I came back here to kick your butt; I decided to kick your daddy’s butt instead.”

And now on this mountain I was trying to make up for my failure on Rainer. On this day, on this easy mountain, I was climbing solo in October. I was over fifty and feeling compelled to prove to myself, to the mountains that I still had the will to conquer large mountains.  I was still a mountain man; still a bad-ass dude that still had what it took to make it in the wilderness. That was why I was freezing on the side of this ant hill.

Stepping from a wobbly rock I lost my balance and my leg got wedged mid-calf in a deep crevice just under the summit. I might be on an easy mountain, but the conditions I had put myself in ratcheted up the risk factor. The thought sobered me, I needed to pay attention. Pulling my leg out of the crag, I examined the scrape, wiped the blood and took care where I stepped as I topped out the mountain.

I made note of the triumph in my journal and leaned up against a large stack of stones encircling the geological marker placed by the U.S. Forrest Department.  Right in my face was the fourteen thousand foot triumvirate to challenge and dwarf me. After scribbling self-congratulatory entries I wrote this question in my notebook:  What kind of old man do you want to be?

I have opted for growth and grace as my old-age lifestyle.

I asked God for a rebirth of spirit and mind on that mountain and found a wonderful liberation. Liberation from feeling I always had to be right and had to please everyone’s definition of what it means to be a man of God. Liberation from having to be more successful this year than last, from fearing that some people wouldn’t like me; a slow and certain liberation that said, “Be content to be a pleasure to Jesus, a lover to your wife and a grandfather to your children’s children, a friend to those who want to share life with you, and a servant to your generation.”

Some of that freedom came from the grace and kindness of Jesus and also from having to clean up after a failure in my personal life. Those who know me now know my worst moments, my most embarrassing failures. I was free now to open my life and be what I was: a sinner who survives only because of the charity of Christ.

With every step down that wind-swept ridge I felt the surge of vitality in my soul. I would descend with a new understanding of my place and my pilgrimage towards being the man God dreamed up before He flung the stars into the obsidian sky.

Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose…so that you may… shine like stars in the universe…”

  Philippians 2:12 and15

We rose early and began our marathon climb from the lower lake. Jim Shepherd, Justin Harris and Cole, these men are valuable to me.  They contour my life like no terrain or map could. Cole for he is my blood-kin and first born son. Jim and Justin because they are soul-kin and men I have grown to love like sons. We shared a primordial passion for wilderness adventure and decided to take it out on three Colorado Fourteeners.

Jim, with his shrew-like metabolism and speed-climbing style, took the lead as we set out from camp. Justin and Cole followed respectively. I brought up the rear, or as my grandfather might have said had this been a cattle drive, “Joe is pulling drag.”

As we pushed our way up the scree and talus slope, the distance between climbers grew. Jim is the best athlete and in the best shape, followed by his best friend, Justin, and then Cole. I am several hundred yards behind, walking fifteen feet and stopping to breathe. My heart thumps in my carotid artery like the bass drum of a stadium rock-n-roll band. Breathing is as difficult for me as if a piano was sitting on my chest. “I can’t keep up with these flat-bellies,” I say between gasps to no one and everyone.

Then it occurs to me that they don’t know where they are going. I am the only one who has climbed any of these peaks before. While there is no way to get lost above tree line, there are some wrong turns that would cause them to backtrack if they miss a cairn. I smile to myself at the orneriness of letting that occur so I could catch up or pass them on the climb. But for now they climb fast and wait for the old man to catch up.

The route ascends from South Colony Lake northward to a large relatively flat area called the Playground of the Bears.  We sat and marveled at the large gray monolithic granite peaks that shrank us to grasshopper-sized men.  Nothing is as awe-inspiring and intimidating as sipping water and munching energy bars while peaks loomed in front of us.

Keeping up with them was not possible; I had to let them climb at their pace and try to keep them in sight. I gave Jim the route I would take and told him to watch for cairns that will mark the way. I asked him to pace himself in such a way he kept the second climber in sight and for each to do that down the line. I wanted to see the climber in front of me even if he was a quarter a mile away.

That is how it played out. From cairn to cairn up the shoulder of Kit Carson we went. Over large slag-like boulders that tilted and shifted and then on to soft green carpeted tundra, back to the boulder fields and then across a slide of scree and talus. The going was uncomplicated but very draining as we ascended higher and higher into the thin Colorado air.

Kit Carson has a false summit. I prepared for it in my mind, but when I actually arrived and could see the 800’ descent we would have to negotiate and then gain that ground back to finally summit, I collapsed, curled up in a kind of fetal position and rested. Battling fatigue, embarrassment for being so slow, and discouragement for what lay ahead, I pulled the blue hood of my wind and rain parka over my head for privacy and had a moment with God.

A voice inside my head said, “You know you want to lie down here and rest. You could wait for them to summit. You could say you just don’t have it in you and promise to do better tomorrow when you climb the Needle.” A competing voice said, “You will never have this opportunity again to summit this tough mountain with your son and these men you love. You want to share this experience with them. You want to be there with them on that summit. You will not quit.  This isn’t all of who you are, but climbing and pushing yourself in the wilderness is a big part of who you are. Now get up and show these guys the way down and up.”

I pulled my hood off my face and shook the Gollum voices out of my head, ate an energy bar, sipped some water and said, “We can’t get there from here doing this.” Descending the false summit we started climbing on solid granite rock faces. I have always been good at climbing this type of surface. Finding footholds and handholds and seeing a good route were natural and easy for me. I found that I could keep up with these guys on this rock and my spirit began to soar.

In fact, I began to sing.

It’s Summertime,

And the livin’ is easy

Fish are jumpin’

And the cotton is high

The guys thought I was delusional; I was just enjoying a rocky mountain high. The steep rock face equalized the playing field for me. Some of the guys were not as comfortable on that kind of surface as I was. I was giddy with their discomfort.

We summited Kit Carson and began the long journey back to camp. As we picked our way down the boulder field and onto the Bears’ Playground, a thunderstorm moved in from the west and pushed us across the large open ground. We did not want to be caught out in the open. Back at camp we decided to take the next day off for some fishing and recovery. We had spent about fifteen hours climbing Kit Carson and all needed some rest—not just the old man.

Crestone Needle is risky for different reasons. The route we chose was a popular one with lots of class three scrambles and several class four patches where we needed all four points on the mountain. The “class” system is a way to classify the degree of difficulty and technical requirement of a given route. It helps a climber prepare for and anticipate the complexities of a climb. A simple hike on a trail would be rated 1^st class, a harder hike with steep ground would be rated 2^nd class. Starting with 3^rd class, mountaineers should be aware of fall potential; 4^th class involves difficult scrambling with real fall potential—you may need a rope.

We settled into the same climbing order we had on Kit Carson. This time, however, it would be important to know which crease in the granite to use in the climb. Some lead to a dead-end requiring backtracking.

I explained the route to Jim and the guys and gave them a general understanding about how to climb the mountain. They would have enough information to see the best route if I painted a good enough word-picture. They would be out of sight much of the climb and needed to pay attention to the cairns and landmarks I described. Their success would be predicated on my instructions and their observations and intuitive judgments.

From the saddle between Broken Hand and The Needle lies the expanse of the San Luis Valley to the west and the undulating glacier moraines of the Wet Mountain Valley to the east. The wind was fierce and the trail well-worn in the grassy southern slope of the pass. Cottonwood Lake sits below like a shard of glass lying on a soft green carpet of summer grass at the base of Crestone Peak.

Off went the flat-bellies on the trail following the cairns up the crag of granite. I was still pushing the piano off of my chest at the saddle and sipping water. The clouds moved in to obscure the peak, but visibility was still manageable. We crossed a ravine refilling our water bottles and up the gulley we climbed. I could keep them in sight more this day than on Kit Carson. The class 4 was helping me keep up.

About two thirds of the way up someone took a wrong turn in their route-finding and overshot the best route boxing the three of them in on a hundred foot cliff face that they would have to take care to descend. Coming up from below I could see the correct route off to the left for a few reasons. One was because I had summited the mountain twice before. Another was because years of experience on exposed rock provided me with a decent eye for good routes. But the best reason I could tell where not to go was by seeing their failed attempt.

With the trio of speed-climbers stuck on the cliff face and one of them struggling to find his way down, the others helping and encouraging him, I blew by them and took the lead. I smiled.

Your daddy’s rich

And your mamma’s good lookin’

So hush little baby

Don’t you cry

By the time we summited, the entire peak was engulfed with a thick shroud of clouds. The fear of bad weather was not present and I am not sure why. People die on this mountain every year. In fact almost exactly one week after our summit a couple was swept off the mountain in a storm and died. But this gray day was a day of celebration. We took fuzzy pictures and made our way down the mountain. It was a triumphal climb; my most enjoyable climb in years. Perhaps it was because it showed I still had some mountain mojo. Yeah…that was it.

Then next day we clod-hoppered our way up Humboldt in an anticlimactic climb. The best part of that climb was the vantage point where we had a panoramic view of Kit Carson and Crestone Needle.

Author John Eldridge asks, “What makes you come alive? What stirs your heart?  In the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.  If a man does not find those things for which his heart is made, if he is never even invited to live for them from his deep heart, he will look for them in some other way.”

As an adult in the mountains I had enjoyed the point position in all the climbs. I was the route finder, the pace-setter, in charge and in control. I enjoyed the power that comes from such an authoritative position. People depended on me. They needed me. I was admired. Being out front and trail blazing or trail finding is adventurous. It drills into what it means to be a man, for I feel we are put on this earth to do heroic things. I don’t know many men who do not want to be someone’s hero.  It may be their wife or their child. It may be someone at work or the kid down the street. We long to be a part of something epic. The wilderness has always provided a compressed version of that epic adventure that I long to live out in my day-to-day life as a man in lower lands.

Good leaders change and adapt. If they don’t there is no adventure, for inertia becomes the enemy of leadership. I am slowly learning that leading from the point is not my place anymore. There is a role for me as the one who has climbed the mountain before and I have come to value the utility of securing the climbing team to the mountain with a spiritual anchor. I am not the first one up the mountain anymore, never will be again; but I enjoy knowing what I know.

There are other ways to lead.

“So he shepherded them according to the integrity of his heart…”

Psalm 78:72

When my son, Clinton, was in his late teens I gave him the book after reading it myself and it touched his life in ways that certain books scratch adolescent angst. After his graduation I decided to take Clinton on a pilgrimage of sorts to the end of the trail where McCandless died in an old abandoned bus he had used as a shelter. I wanted to build a bridge with my son upon which we could always stand no matter how wide the expanse between a father and a son might be.

In late August we made camp a couple miles up the trail beside a stream that wound through the muskeg, dwarfed spruce and heather that stretches as far as you can see in any direction. The trees don’t grow very tall in the arctic tundra due to the permafrost just a few inches beneath the soft black soil. They stand here and there like lonely sentinels undecided about community-standoffish.

Darkness did not arrive until around midnight in this far northern landscape and then retreated early the next morning. We ate some hot oatmeal and very black coffee. Clinton enjoys black and bold coffee as much as I do. We slung backpacks over our shoulders and set out with a topographical map in hand and bear spray holstered to our shoulder straps in deep anticipation of exploring the Alaskan bush.

The land is flat and wet with McKinley several hundred miles south of where we were. Mount McKinley, or Denali, is the highest mountain peak in North America and the United States, with a summit elevation of 20,320 feet above sea level.  After an hour hike we moved into some trees-spruce and alders. The alders were starting to turn golden like the fall colors that would come in October in the lower forty-eight. It was a beautiful and cold day; a good day to be in the wild with my son.

Two hours into our hike we came across the first river to ford. We stripped down to our underwear and unbuckled the hip belts on our packs to cross the fast moving water that was glacier cold, gray and swirled like thin cement around our thighs. Words are sparse while in the wilderness with Clint. I like it that way.

A few more hours of walking and we came to the river that had doomed the fate of the young hiker a decade earlier. We decided to pick our way through the brush and willows to the sandy river bottom to scout a possible shallow in which to cross the Teklanika River. In the soft sand of the river bottom we saw the prints of a grizzly bear. I looked at Clint and we both put our hands on our holstered bear spray, mindlessly checking to see if they were still strapped tightly.

“Wow,” I said. “Look at the size of that print!”

“I think you could fit your boot inside that print, Dad” Clint said.

Our eyes widened as we looked at each other and simultaneous grins broke out on our bearded faces. We knew we were in wild country. We had known it before we saw the bear tracks, but now it was a hair-raising knowledge. We walked back through the brush to explore other crossing possibilities. This time I shouted every ten steps, “It’s just us, bear! Coming through, bear. Hey, bear!”

As much as we looked up and down the river, we couldn’t find any place that felt safe enough to cross toward our destination of the bus. Three of the five braids of the river were shallow enough, but then in that forth braid, the water would hit our waist about thirty yards out and the pressure on my legs made me feel too insecure to continue. I really wanted to cross the river and make it to that bus for my son. But the conditions were too dangerous. What kept McCandless in, was keeping us out: a swollen river.

We made camp and explored up and down the river. Clinton found a baby artic owl walking on the river bed. We kept seeing bear prints in the sand. But it seemed as if all other animals and birds felt the harsh winter coming and had abandoned the land.

After supper Clinton took our pans to the river to wash, using the sand to scrub them clean. I followed him at a distance wanting to get some candid video in the wild of this almost sacred place for him. Looking through the view finder I saw him stand and face across the river towards the direction of where the bus might be. His lips moved as if he were talking to someone. He pointed and said something else inaudible. I felt like a voyeur. Turning his head he saw me videoing and quickly picked up the pans.

The next morning we were packed up getting ready to hike back out when we heard an engine noise coming our way. It was two hunters on ATVs. They stopped and we visited with these two native Alaskans decked out in their camouflage clothing. They were scouting for moose because the season was just a few weeks away. We said we hadn’t seen any moose tracks, but we had seen some bear tracks. They noticed our bear spray and commented that it was good we had brought those. I said casually that our friend who dropped us off on the highway offered the use of his Springfield 1911 .45 caliber handgun. But I had declined.

One of the guys said, “Yeah, when you bring a hand gun back here, always make sure that you file down the front site of the gun.”

“Really?” I said. Clinton and I were leaning forward, trying to figure out the logic of filing down the front site when he said with a serious look, “Yeah, make sure you file that down because it doesn’t hurt nearly as much when the bear takes it away from you and then shoves it up your ass.”

We laughed because we had been lured into such an obvious verbal snare.

The hunters told us that the film crew of the movie Into the Wild was being choppered into the bus site all week.  We bid our farewells and began to hike out.

With every step out to the trailhead, Clinton and I talked more and more. The conversation spanned our favorite moment of the last couple of days, our favorite bands, books and movies. We talked about his future, his plans and what was most important to him. Towards the end of the day our conversation turned to matters of faith. Clinton struggled with Church, found the culture of church to feel contrived and artificial. I allowed that often it does. People try to project a persona that is unreal and perceptive souls can smell it a long ways off.

I probed about his journey with Jesus. He said he wasn’t sure where he stood with God. I hid how that pained my pastor’s heart that this son of mine would be turned off by the very institution to which I had given most all of my life. It hurt deeply. Still does.

With soggy boots and sore hips we stopped at a little rise where the trail sneaks out of the wooded plains and the valley of heather and tundra grass stretches for miles, dotted with those lonesome trees standing vigil. I knew I might never again get this moment in this place with this person I loved so much. I told him how much I loved him and that I wanted him to love the Jesus I know and love. Stopping I turned to Clinton and told him what I hope he always remembers: “It isn’t about Church, Clinton. It is about Jesus. Find Jesus and find a group of followers of Jesus and gather with them to worship Him, learn from Him and serve this world. If you do that you will find that He is right beside you.”

I paused to let the silence of the wilderness push the words deep into his fallowed soul. He nodded. I had no idea what the nod meant. He never said.

We had gone on this journey to cross a swollen river and find a bus where a young man died. We came home having built a bridge in the wild. Not to a bus or over a river, but from one heart to another.

Upon this bridge we still stand.

He has shown you , O man,what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?  Micah 6:8

 

]]> http://joechambers.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/walking-in-the-wild-3/feed/ 2 greyrunner Alaska 2006 013 Alaska 2006 024 Alaska 2006 010 Alaska 2006 014 Alaska 2006 019 Alaska 2006 031 http://joechambers.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/the-first-wild/ http://joechambers.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/the-first-wild/#comments Sat, 05 Nov 2011 16:45:50 +0000 Joe Chambers http://joechambers.wordpress.com/?p=726 ]]> When my oldest son, Cole, was six years old I took him into the wilderness for the first time. We traveled to what I consider my home town of Westcliffe, Colorado. His little snoopy pack was loaded up with his clothes, toilet paper, and the salt and pepper. Everyone has to carry their share in the Chambers family.

We drove up the rough old mining road of South Colony to the Rainbow Trail and started our hike from there. Like its namesake, Rainbow Trail arcs through the Sangre de Cristo mountain range for about a hundred miles. We headed for North Colony across the base of Humboldt Peak. North Colony beaver ponds were a favorite camp area of my family when we moved to Colorado from Texas.

It was dark on the Rainbow Trail and the trees seemed to close in around us as it got darker. After about half a mile of hiking Cole began to lag behind.  He could barely keep up enough to walk in the opaque splash of light from my flashlight. If I slowed down he did too, so he was always in the dark tripping over little rocks and roots. I grabbed a little stick for him to hold on to one end and I held the other. I chose one that would fit his little hand, was not too heavy for his spindly arms, one that fit just right— then we started to sing a song to distract us from the darkness and improve our pace.

Father Abraham had many sons

Many sons had Father Abraham

I am one of them

And so are you

So let’s just praise the Lord

Time flew as we sang, laughed and marched in the dark along that trail. Before we knew it we arrived at Lone Tree Meadow where we planned to camp and fish in the beaver ponds.  I had Cole hold the flashlight as I set up the tent and started our supper.

“I have to pee,” he said.

I wanted him away from camp and yet where I could see him so that he wouldn’t be lost in the darkness. About twenty feet from our camp was the stump of a dead sapling that had been rubbed down by a rutting bull elk. I took him there and said, “Any time you need to pee, just come to this stump and have at it.” We called it our “pee stick” over the next few days. He thought that was funny.

We crawled into our sleeping bags and my little guy fell fast asleep. I listened to the gurgling stream only a few feet away. Laying a hand on my son’s poly-filled bag, I felt his body rise up and down with his breathing and remembered being in the same meadow with my family two decades before.

Nature called and so as he lay sleeping I went to visit the pee stick. I left the flashlight on in the tent so he would be less afraid if he woke up and didn’t see me than if it was pitch dark. The Milky Way stretched across the blackness of the summer night sky. I glanced back to see the tent move and the light flicker as he rolled over in his bag. It reminded me of the first time I went with my father into the wild many years ago. It was dark then, too.

I was about five years old and we lived in Texas where he finished his undergraduate work. We were camping on the shores of Lake Brownwood. He and a friend had set out trotlines earlier in the day. Those lines must be checked from time to time and the best time to do that is at night. We had no boat, so as I remember it, they lashed some car inner tubes together to make a raft. With paddles or long poles we pushed off from the shore into the night. The only thing darker than the sky was the water. I was afraid I would fall off the raft and slip into the wet darkness, so I clung to the cut poles and lashing as if my life depended on it.  We sloshed and splashed for what seemed like hours. Up ahead, in the beam of a flashlight carried by one of the men, a plastic jug floated in the water. It was tied to an overhanging willow limb and bobbed up and down.

“Might be a good one on that line!” my dad said.

Sure enough, up from the depths came a gray-green catfish that looked as big as me. My dad put it on a line of nylon cord and handed the end of it to me saying, “Watch out that you don’t let the catfish get against the tube there, son. He has very sharp spines in those fins and it might puncture your tube.”

I felt the weight of responsibility fall heavy on my thin shoulders. The catfish thrashed in the water and pulled at my arm. Then it flopped over onto the tube and suddenly you could hear the hiss and gurgle of air blowing through water. Surely I would be the cause of all of us drowning that night. I got scared and looked for our camp. The campfire on shore seemed miles away.

Dad stretched his leg out to my tube and put his big toe on the leak. With his arm around me he said, “Don’t be afraid, son. That’s why we have your tube lashed to mine.” We rowed and splashed our way back to shore with my dad’s big toe over the hole and him laughing all the way.

“Dad!”  The words jolted me back to Colorado.

“Out here at the pee stick, son,” I shouted in his direction.

“You peed on that stick so long I think it is going to start growing again, Dad,” he giggled.

As I zipped up the tent door, turned out the flashlight and got comfortable in my sleeping bag, I breathed a deep sigh of gratitude for being in the wild for the first time with my first child.

Thank you, Lord, for putting the love of the wild into my father’s heart.

Thank you for keeping it safe in mine.

May it grow in this son at my side.

May his children one day move into the holy wild.

For I am one of them

And so are you

So let’s just praise the Lord.

It was supposed to be a few days of introducing city-dwellers to a taste of the wilderness.  Nothing dramatic or harrowing, a little fishing, a few hikes in the alpine meadows and they would be sufficiently challenged.

They all trusted me.  I had grown up in these mountains and had led backpacking trips into them for years.  They trusted me for my knowledge and experience in the mountains.  They trusted me because each of them, at different levels of intimacy, had bared their souls to me in confidence.  They trusted me because I was their pastor.

The week of fishing, hiking, and exploring was relaxing and pedestrian.  As we prepared and ate a dinner meal one evening someone said, “Hey pastor, let’s climb Broken Hand tomorrow,” they said.

“Okay,” I said.  “We will leave after a good breakfast in the morning.  Bring a lunch, your wool hat and gloves, and your rain parka.  We should be up and down in about four hours; three hours up and one down.”

The next morning the sun bathed Crestone Needle in a soft red hue that reminded me of why that mountain range was named the Sangre De Cristos—Blood of Christ.  We ate a simple breakfast of oatmeal and coffee, packed our gorp, filled our water bottles and stuffed our day packs.  It was a cool morning so most wore their wool gloves and hat.  We said a prayer and off we went.

When people would ask me why the mountain was named Broken Hand I would tell them, “Well, look at it.  See that large outcropping of rock on the north ridge?  Looks like a twisted thumb doesn’t it?  See that series of spirals off the side of the summit?  Don’t they look like finger nubs?”  But that was all told in ignorance.  I had forced that explanation onto many people over the years until I was reading about the history of the mountains I had grown up in and learned that an Irish-born man named Tom Fitzpatrick who had made a name for himself as mountain man and scout for the Fremont expeditions of the early 19^th century—the mountain was named after him.  Broken Hand is what the Rocky Mountain Indians called him due to a musket exploding in his hand and resulting in a disfigurement.

There are cairns to mark the trail up over the first rock-band of cliffs.  Then there is a football field-sized shoulder of grass and tundra and a faint trail that leads up to the second larger rock-band.  The trail ends at a twenty foot steep rock wall.  I had been up this scramble before and it is a low exposure scramble requiring four points of contact for about fifteen of the twenty feet of rock.  But for this group it was the most challenging part of their week.  Some were nervous and maybe even a little scared while others loved the feel of “real” mountaineering if only for fifteen feet.

I positioned myself close to the nervous ones and “spotted them” all the while talking them  from one hand-hold and toe-hold to another until they were firmly on the brittle late summer grass above the rock scramble.  After they all were up, I showed off by climbing up the rock face as fast as I could.  It took me about two moves and I was up with them.  They were impressed with my agility on the rock face, especially for a man my size.

Feeling good about myself I said, “We can’t get there from here doing this.” Which is what I always say when it is time for the group to get up and start climbing again.  I don’t know where I got it, maybe from a John Wayne movie.  I say it to this day.

The climb was easy and uneventful from there.  We wound our way between the ribbons of rock and stayed on the grass ledges.  There was no trail, so we just switched back and picked our way up to the summit.  The grade was steep and we stopped often to catch our breath at the high altitude.  On our last break just seventy five yards from the summit I suggested we eat our lunch on this the leeward side of the mountain.  The wind up there can be pretty stiff and as sweaty as we were from the climb it was a good way to get a chill.

After a few minutes of basking in the noonday sun and enjoying our light lunch we gathered ourselves for the last little push to the summit of 13, 570 foot Broken Hand Peak.  Banked by Humboldt Peak on the north and Marble Mountain on the south the South Colony drainage emptied into the tawny colored floor of the Wet Mountain Valley.  The old mining road that had been closed for decades lay on the floor of the heavily wooded canyon like a yellow thread on a green dress as it meandered down towards the Valley.

I had told the group that when we summited we would be able to see into New Mexico.  Said we would be able to see San Antonio Mountain, the San Luis Valley and the Great Sand Dunes.  Turns out that when we finally made the ascent, unknown to us, a massive storm had filled the San Luis Valley to the west.  As far as the eye could see there was nothing but clouds filling the valley floor like smoke filling a bathtub.

And it was coming our way.

“Let’s eat a bite, take a swig of your water and head back down before we get covered by that cloud bank,” I said.

I knew that descending on wet grass and rock was dangerous and that there was only one way off the upper cliff bands—that twenty foot cut in the cliff we had scrambled up earlier; where I had showed off my rock climbing moves.  I was feeling a little anxious when I saw the cloud moving so slowly.  When weather moves slowly it stays a long time swirling around the steep-walled alpine crags and peaks.

I underestimated the how fast the cloud was coming and the slow moving group.  In a matter of minutes we were drenched with the thickest band of moisture I had ever seen.  The wind picked up to around fifteen miles per hour and the mist clung to the hair on my arms.  We put every piece of our clothing on to stay warm and dry.  But that meant that many of the group was still in shorts.  We grew cold.  The ground got slick.  Visibility was reduced to a few feet.  We slowly crept down the grass ledges, carefully placing our feet so as not to slip.

A few in the group began to shiver.  We had not brought enough clothing.  We had no windbreak.  We were unprepared for this weather.  I knew better because this was August and the monsoons from the Gulf of California are as predictable as the sunrise.  The wind began wrapping around the mountain and blowing horizontally along the face of the cliffs, cutting through our clothing.  All the faces kept looking at me with expectancy.  We couldn’t see South Colony Lake below, the canyon floor or any of the surrounding peaks.

All we could feel was the cutting wind and gravity pulling us down.

I looked at my watch and we had been two hours winding and inching our way down the slick face since we had left the summit.  I couldn’t tell how far we had come.  I had no land marks for reference.  I was blind.  I felt a weight in my chest.  Fear.

We were in a situation where our bodies were losing heat faster than we could produce it. The result is hypothermia, or abnormally low body temperature. It can make you sleepy, confused and clumsy. Because it happens gradually and affects your thinking, you may not realize you need help. That makes it especially dangerous. A body temperature below 95° F is a medical emergency and can lead to death if not treated promptly.

Some in our group had become lethargic and very confused.  I had given my wind-pants to a weaker person in the group.  My pectoral and abdominal muscles began to shiver uncontrollably.  I knew as long as I was shivering I was somewhat safe.  My body was in default mode of warming my core.  But how long would that last?  I was losing precious energy by the minute.

With everyone to huddled together against a rock over hang and their backs to the wind to create a windbreak for the weaker ones in the group I left to try to find the cut in the cliff-wall and that twenty foot scramble and get us off of the mountain.

I took about ten steps and looked back towards the group and could hear them talking in muffled tones as if they were speaking through a pillow, but I couldn’t see them.  I tried to get a mental picture of where I was and was drawing a blank.  I dropped down to the edge of the cliff to search for the way out.

I found a little gully and began to slowly descend into it but it ended at the cliffs edge.  (click on the picture) Dead end.  I climbed back up and moved horizontally and found another gully—probed down it—dead end.  Another and another and another…all dead ends.  I was getting weary.  I was getting scared.  I began to run on the across the slick rock and grass in a desperate attempt to find the right cut in the rocks.  I felt the hypothermic clock tick in my brain that my time was running out.  I was desperate to get the group off the mountain.

The opaque cloud blanketing the mountain was not giving up the secrete passage.  I began to breathe out the name “Jesus” with every step.  I’m not sure if it was a prayer or a curse.  I was feeling desperate and panicky; a first for me in the mountains.

I stepped on a table-sized stone and it slid out from under me and disappeared into the mist below.  I instinctively twisted my body to face the wet ground and began to dig my toes and finger tips into the wet rock as I slid down the mountain towards the edge of the cliff.  After ten feet of clawing like a cat slipping off a wet tin roof, the toes of my boots found a three inch crack in the rock and I grabbed a lip of another rock and stopped my fall.  Relieved, I let out a banshee scream of frustration, anger, fear and relief.

Then I heard the rock that I had dislodged slam onto a rock ledge a hundred feet below me.  It bounced and kept bouncing—exploding like a gunshot every time it hit the cliffs.

Suddenly the group who had heard my scream and the rock hitting the cliffs below began to cry out my name, “Joe!  Joe!  Oh, God. Joe!”

“I am alright!” I yelled into the mist.

I looked at my finger tips and saw that all the skin was scraped off and the nail on my ring finger was gone.  It had been torn out to the quick and hung by a thread-thin piece of flesh.  My hands were bleeding, but I was Okay.

I climbed back to the group, calling out to them to give me some directional soundings.  My steps were slower.  I remember thinking, “Joe, you have to slow the action down.”  I took a deep breath and began to call the name of Jesus with every step, like a blind man looking for a friend.

When I got to the group I said, “Let’s all stick together and start working our way the opposite direction horizontally.  What do you guys think?”  For an hour we traversed the mountain until we came to a gully full of talus, scree and snow.  I couldn’t see where it ended.  It disappeared into the cloud.

“What do you guys think about going down this gully and see where it goes?  It may end in a cliff and we will be stuck, but I think we have to get off of this mountain and out of this weather.  Let’s all get in a circle and say a prayer,” I said.

It was a simple prayer, “Jesus, have mercy on our souls.”

We zigged and zagged across the chute of loose scree, waiting for each person to cross before the others attempted so as to not knock down rock on those below.  After seventy five yards of this we hit snow that was captured in the shadows of the gully from last winter.

I am going to make some foot holes in this snow.  You space yourselves about six feet apart, face the mountain, kick your toes deeply into my footprints and carefully back down the snow,” I instructed.

They all nodded their heads that they understood.

Then I said, “We might get down there and find an ice or stone cliff.  I don’t know what we are going to find.  One more thing: if you start to fall and can’t stop yourself by clawing into the snow with your fingers and toes, I will not try to grab you to save you.  If I tried to do that there is a good chance I will be pulled off this mountain with you.  I will wave and pray for you on your way by.”

I heard a few chuckles of nervous laughter.

I turned to face the steep strip of snow and began to kick step backwards down what felt like a bobsled run.  One slip on this snow and I was dead man.  My skinless fingers were numb from digging into the snow.  It was slow going, but I was not scared anymore.  Maybe I was not thinking clearly due to hypothermia, maybe I was leaning on the everlasting arms, but I kept moving.  I looked up to check everyone’s progress and we looked like a daisy chain of humanity perilously perched on very thin holes in the snow.  If the guy at the top lost his footing and started to slide there was a good chance he would slam into the group like bowling pins.

After a few more steps I looked over my shoulder and down the snow and could see the lower lake of South Colony.  We had dropped out of the clouds!  I could see that the snow ribbon was passible all the way down to green grass and a trail about four hundred yards away.  I was ecstatic.  We were going to make it.

I yelled up the good news and said I was going to take one of the teenage boys with me hurry back to camp and fire up a stove for hot drinks and start supper of chicken and dumplings.  A cheer broke out on the mountain.

Later that night sipping hot cherry Jello I muttered under my breath: “Three hours up eight hours down.”  My fingers were bandaged; everyone was rehydrated with warm liquids and had plenty of carbs in their bellies. The group was cocooned in sleeping bags while I stood out in the dark trying to figure out what went wrong.

It was quiet in the meadow save for the sound of the gurgling brook a few feet away.  A bat darted by chasing a desperate insect in the twilight.

I replayed the day in my mind—some parts over and over again.  How did this happen?  How had I come so close to leading seven people to their death?  People die every year in the mountains from less than what we endured.  But, for me, “the expert”…how had we come so close to being one of those sad stories on the ten o’clock news?

I sipped my hot drink, listened to quiet voices in the tents behind me and looked back up at the mountain with the craggy summit silhouetted against a deep indigo sky and I am almost certain I heard a voice say to me, “Arrogant leadership got you into trouble, but humble leadership got you out.”

I crawled into my tent and called my wife on my cell phone and wept.  After she prayed for me I closed my eyes and clawed at the mountain all night in a fitful sleep.

Looking back through the spiritual prism of time, Broken Hand was a warning to me.  It was a prophetic utterance.  Barely a year later, I ignored this warning and fell off a moral mountain taking many good people with me in my fall.

That was a long time ago.  I have spent many years relearning what it means to be a leader.  Sometimes you only get one Broken Hand warning.  Better learn your lesson while you can still climb.

I am climbing and leading again, slower and more careful this time, but I am climbing…usually from the back of the pack.

Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.  1 Cor. 10:12