Dear Friends,

This is the nineteenth and last message in a series about the people and experiences that God has used to shape my spiritual life. My prayer is that these messages have inspired you to reflect on the people and events that have brought you closer to Jesus.

From my first revelation of grace in a divine intervention against a bullying teacher in my childhood through tragedies and conflicts, into the amazing shelter of marriage and fatherhood, down the rutted streets of Kabul, Afghanistan, into experiences of forgiveness and mercy in law firm conference rooms and in the wild mountains of Arizona, and now up a rocky Vermont path, I have shared with you my journey of faith in Jesus thus far.

But it is more than a journey of faith in Jesus. It is my life found, gifted and rooted in his life and his love.

It can hurt to follow Jesus. I won’t lie to you. Our attachments to this world, many of them praised as blessings of talent and relationship, are binding and strong. Yet, Jesus says, “None of you can become my disciples unless you give up all your possessions” (Luke 14:33). Many of those possessions are the result of hard work or are compensation for betrayal and injury by others. Yet, the Jesus of the Cross demands everything of his followers even as the resurrected Jesus offers a completely new life.

There is no greater relief than to experience Jesus’ life as your own. That is in the words of Watchman Nee, “the normal Christian life.” We waste so much time trying to remodel our life into perfection and become weary and ashamed at our failures and dismayed at the inhospitality of this world. “Come to me,” Jesus says, and rest and learn from me and you can travel light with me” (Matt 11:28-30).

The author of Hebrews wrote that God is “not ashamed” to be the God of those pilgrims who realize they were never meant to settle for life on this earth and who follow their desire to be with God all the way home (Heb 11:13-16). Making that trek involves many challenges, even detours, but it is possible when we know that we have a Heavenly Father and a Savior who loves us and won’t quit on us.

So I keep moving on with Jesus, still learning and making missteps here and there, but he is patient and faithful and the walk gets easier as I yield to his lead. This last message is an account from my journal of a walk in the dark I took in the Vermont woods where I travel on business the first week of every October. The walk serves as a metaphor for my journey of faith. May you be blessed and encouraged in reading it.
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I slip out of the inn into the fog-roofed darkness. There is a museum-quality stillness pervading the quintessential New England village of Woodstock, Vermont in the pre-dawn. The empty streets around the green await the busses of the fall-foliage tours and the SUV hybrids and Subarus of the local folk.

The covered bridge and residential streets are familiar to me from walks during breaks in meetings the pervious week. I easily maneuver the route to the town park. I hope the clunk of the rental car door doesn’t disturb anyone asleep in the beautiful, old homes across the street. It occurs to me that a Californian would have a hard time explaining his presence here at 5:30 a.m.

There’s a walking stick in my right hand and in my left a bottle of water that I carried on the plane for 3,000 miles. My plan is to hike up Mount Tom, the forested peak that borders Woodstock on the east. The brochure calls the route “a European-style walking path with many switch-backs and benches for the contemplation of nature.”

It is much too dark to reflect on nature at this moment. I can barely make out the ground at my feet as I swish through leaves. There are no stars or moon. The only illumination is from a couple of porch lights in adjacent yards. I zig-zag across the grass as I approach the forest, but I can’t find the path. I drag the brass ferrule of the walking stick across the ground until it rasps on asphalt and I’m off.

This is a hike I wanted to take from the time I first looked up Woodstock on the Internet when I knew that business would bring me here. I thought I missed the chance, but when I was awake at 4:30 a.m., with sleep not likely to return, I thought “It’s now or never.” Patricia will wake and note that I’m wearing my Levis and sneakers and took the water bottle and she’ll figure out where I’ve gone.

Following Christ was like this. I didn’t plan it. One afternoon I reached into a stack of books and picked the right one to read on a business trip. It stirred me awake. I prayed a halting, groping prayer that was answered by Christ’s call and my long spiritual torpor was over. It was only the start of the path and I hadn’t a clue where I was going, but the Spirit’s call was “It’s now or never.”

The woods enclose me in blackness. I stop and squeeze my eyes shut for adjustment. On opening, I can only make out the tops of my white running shoes. My left knee is fragile and tender with osteoarthritis. I’m a continent away from home and not another soul knows where I am in this moment. Maybe, I should turn around and go back.

There is a disorienting moment after taking the first steps towards Jesus when you look up and realize that no one else is with you and, no matter what you’ve been told, the path is different than it looked on the map and was described in the guidebook. You wonder if you missed something and whether you should turn around and go back. Prayer in that moment is uttered with eyes closed tight in the hope of seeing something when they open again.

The dark enlivens the senses in a process of subtraction. Sound, sight, and breeze are absent. I sigh and the musk of dust, pine, rock, and moss fills my nose and lungs. It is the universal smell of the forest, the same on the west coast as the east. Each distinct smell is a reminder of places different, but familiar.

Comforted by the familiar scent, I step forward tapping my stick ahead of me like a blind man. Slowly, I move ahead over roots and stones. At an opening in the trees, I can pick out the silhouette of a bench in the ambient light and I realize that I must be at the turn of a switchback. The town hall clock strikes 6:00 a.m.

The first day after encountering Christ, I began to read the Gospels starting with Matthew 1 and moving ahead. What I found there was familiar, but different.

There was a time when I was graded on what I could remember of the Scriptures. The emphasis was on rote memorization of strings of proof texts undergirding doctrinal constructs. Without the challenge of experience, the exercises often seemed absurd and useless. The texts lay at the back of my mind as dry and dead as the leaves and twigs I am now crunching underfoot. But in the Springtime of Christ’s love, the Scriptures opened up to me like a poppy at daylight, and I began to see my way through them, enjoying the unexpected twists and turns.

A poem of Robert Frost, written about Vermont woods in the winter, is brought to mind with the rhythm of my heartbeats.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep…
(Stopping By the Woods On a Snowy Evening, 1922)

The Congregational Church clock strikes 6:00 a.m., five minutes after the town hall clock. What is behind the discrepancy? A division of church and state? God versus mammon? Pride? An old feud? Which clock is right? “Avoid stupid controversies…dissensions, and quarrels about the law,” Paul wrote Titus, “for they are unprofitable and worthless” (Tit 3:9).

My early efforts to talk with others about what I was learning in Scripture ran into some arguments about time. One friend was obsessed about an obscure bit of prophecy. “I don’t think that’s important,” I told him in frustration. “And if we can’t get beyond this I’m done talking.

“It is important,” he retorted, because it’s in the Bible.”

“I don’t think anything that is that obscure and hard to figure out could be important. Besides, every explanation of that idea I’ve ever heard required extra-Biblical sources. God clues us in on what he wants us to know if we want to know it. I think something this complicated and trivial is just crazy-making.”

“So what do you think is important,” he demanded.

“OK, Here’s what I think is important. We were created by God in love. He gave us the the power of choice to live in intimate relationship with him depending on his grace or on our own because love without choice isn’t love. Adam and Eve chose to live by their own wits and effort and turned their backs on God’s grace.

“We’ve been making the same mistake ever since. God loves us too much to give up on us. He started us back by calling people like Abraham and Moses and formed a people for himself with a set of instructions. They couldn’t even stay faithful to the instructions so God’s Son came to do what we couldn’t do. He gave his life on the cross to break our vicious cycles of sin and repentance. effort and failure. The Father, in the glory of his love raised the Son from the grave to lead us back to life as it was meant to be.

I continued, “If we accept Christ as the way, the truth and the life, we are restored to grace as new creations. Christ is going to return to finish the job physically that he has completed spiritually. Knowing this to be true we are free to live the way God wants us to live. Those are the essentials of what I think is important. Everything else is crazy-making!”

I don’t know which of us was more surprised when I managed to get all that said, but our fellowship was restored in agreement.

My pace is slower than normal because I’m watching my feet. Thoughts flit at random through my mind. I read–I’ve forgotten where–that the Early Christians hiding in the Catacombs of Rome wore shoes with candle holders on their toes to guide their steps in the blackness. They would have had to walk slowly to avoid putting out the candles. “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps 119:105). I love the double perspective of this verse. It says I’m going somewhere, but I’m going there one step at a time. I can handle that much.

The trees begin to take form. Boulders hulk beside the trail. My knuckles graze them. Rock feels the same all over the world. It’s elemental and dependable whether as a protection or an obstacle. Probably that’s why it is a common metaphor for Jesus. He said of himself: ” ‘ The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes’…The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls” (Mt 21:42, 44).

This is the judgment in stark terms–fall over Christ and break or else Christ falls on you and crushes you. There is no hope for the complacent and the self-protective, but the broken have access to the grace of Jesus to restore us to life.

The benches keep me honest at the turns. Some of them are milled furniture, others are split logs cradled on stumps. I recall the switchbacks recorded on the map and try to count them to keep track of how far I’ve come. The guidebook was a help in orienting me. There’s nothing, however, like walking the trail for yourself.

My parents took me to church every week. They sacrificed to send me to church school right through college. I learned the hymns and memorized the verses. I studied church history and doctrine. I attended chapel as required and mostly kept the rules. After my mother read the story of my coming alive in Christ at age thirty-seven, she looked at me grimly and asked,”Surely, we must have done something right?”

“Mom,” I said, “do you think that my coming to God on my own reflects badly on you? I am thankful for the family worships, going to church, church school and the examples that you and Dad set for me. Those are all stepping stones leading me towards God. But I had to experience Jesus for myself. You couldn’t do that for me. This isn’t about you.”

There are some parents and church leaders who expect the Christian colleges and universities I represent to graduate mature, conforming Christians each year and every year. They become distressed, even angry, when this doesn’t happen so they add rules and change personnel to try to make it happen. The cycle merely repeats itself in fear, pain and loathing. The things of God, the angel told Zechariah, are accomplished “Not by might, not by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of Hosts” (Zech 4:6).

As, a wise old attorney-mentor once told me, “The thing about people is that they just won’t mind and you can’t make them mind. You have to persuade them.” The most that can be expected of Christian education is that it provides building blocks for faith, but the construction of faith cannot be forced. An insightful 19th century author wrote to the same point: “Minds are constituted differently; while force may secure outward submission, the result with many children is a more determined rebellion of the heart…It is not God’s purpose that any mind should be thus dominated. Those who destroy individuality assume a responsibility that can result only in evil…[W]hen the control ceases, the character will be found to lack strength and steadfastness” (Ellen G. White, Education [Pacific Press: Mountain View, CA, 1952], p 288).

The Apostle John likewise noted that it was impossible to manufacture believers. “He (Jesus) came to his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:11-13).

We read the maps and the guidebook and if we have a lick of sense the information may give us landmarks to follow, but each of us has to walk the path for ourselves. How many men and women leave the path altogether because someone has tried to force their steps, control their gait and critically scrutinize their every movement towards God? It is an evil, even monstrous, thing to try to coerce what only the Holy Spirit can empower and guide.

Persons of my heritage have climbed this slope since 1761 when the end of the French and Indian War made it safe to move into the area. I wonder who may have sat on the benches I find on the knoll overlooking the town. It looks like trail’s end, but it’s not. A wooden sign says “Mount Tom-200 yards.” I look up in the growing light to see steps carved out of the rocky bluffs above. A cable and stanchions run beside the steep path for support and protection. Just as I haul myself to the top, the town hall clock strikes 7:00 a.m., the moment of dawn. Five minutes later, the church bell says its seven, but it’s not true, dawn has already come.

Up top is a broad carriage path from the other side of the mountain. It was built by Frederick Billings, a lawyer who made a great fortune in Gold Rush San Francisco and later from the Northern Pacific Railroad before retiring as a gentleman farmer to Woodstock. The carriage paths allowed his guests the experience of the forest and vistas in comfort not unlike the tour busses that roll through the valley below these days. The path continues through the kind of “yellow wood” that Robert Frost wrote about in another poem about the Vermont autumn (The Road Not Taken). The mountain rolls on and on and the carriage path winds around cleared pastures with green grass of such even height it would be considered lawn in California.

I startle two deer who crash off into the woods, white tails flashing. Then I walk out across an immense pasture sloping north to south down to a large pond identified as “The Pogue” on the map. Encircling the pasture are maples and birch clad in yellow, orange, pink and scarlet so intense that the effect seems hot and combustible even under the glowering, gray October sky. I walk to the center of the field and turn in circles trying to absorb the glory. The viewfinder of my camera is inadequate to the task wherever I stand. My heart thrills with the vivid display of the Creator’s power.

For glory to be real, it has to overwhelm. This is why you can go to all the seminars and lectures on worship that you can find, but worship will ever and always be a spontaneous response to transcendent, surpassing beauty. David stood in woods like this and exclaimed–

Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name;
worship the Lord in holy splendor.
(Ps 29:2)

.

Regardless of my fumbling walk in the dark, the steepness of the trail and the rising, cold, west wind that is icing over my perspiration, the journey is worth it. I will never forget this morning. But I must go back. There is a check-out time and a plane to catch. By tonight I’ll be back in California.

On the way down, I exchange greetings with a hiker whose accent and reserve identifies him as a “local.” I’m envious. I flick a tick off my arm. Squirrels chatter in the woods. Then there is a thrashing in the leaves above followed by a sudden silence.

I look up and see and hear a bronze and gray hawk pump its wings to power up and out of the trees with a squirrel in its talons. It is terrible and it is great. It is a benediction.

What would I have missed if I hadn’t left my warm bed, searched for the path in the dark and walked it one step at a time? Frost wrote in The Road Not Taken (1916):
.

Two roads diverged into a wood, –and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference….

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Frost was right. I decided to leave the comfortable and conventional to follow Jesus and that has made all the difference for me. I can never go back regardless of where Jesus leads me from here.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8).

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.

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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.