Last week I went on a week long camping trip in the wilderness of South Carolina. For a day and a half we hiked over thirteen miles. On Monday we hiked three and a half miles which was painful but manageable. However we ended up hiking ten miles straight on Tuesday, which was torture. I experienced what it literally felt like to be physically “dying to myself”. I didn’t fully understand what the call from Jesus to “die to myself daily” meant before, but through this experience I definitely get it now. It was only by the strength and grace of God that I finished the hike. I learned a few lessons I would like to share with you from this treacherous path the Lord called me to.
Lesson one
The first thing I learned about on this trip was about baggage. In life, and especially on this hiking trip, we find ourselves carrying around baggage. The baggage that we carry every day might not be the same kind of baggage we had to carry while we were hiking, but it is still the perfect analogy. When we were hiking we had to carry not only clothes but food, tents, pans, tarps, the list goes on and on. Carrying that much stuff around made the trip so much harder. Imagine how much easier the trip would have been had we left our bags behind us in the van. Our relationship with God often looks like him stripping our unnecessary and unneeded baggage away from us.
I feel that this process is similar to being put through a juicer. When He puts you through a juicer all the unwanted things or pulp come out one end to be disposed of, which leave His fruits or Himself in the purest form on the other end. In this heavenly juicer we have all of our baggage in the form of pride, anger, jealousy, gossip, greed, lust, ambitious intent, an so on. In that juicer we also have kindness, self control, love, humility, compassion, patience, and goodness. We are in a constant process of being juiced by God as he strips away the unnecessary baggage we have picked up along the way. God is always at work in us, purifying us, taking out all the sinful desires and leaving only Himself. The Lord is in a process of continuously stripping us of all the things that are not of him and leaving us pure.
In order for us to be purified we have to experience some pain. Can you imagine being sliced in a juicer daily? It sure doesn’t sound like a picnic. Unfortunately for our feelings God is not as interested in our comfort as He is in our character. He’s about making us into the likeness of Christ and He will do whatever it takes to make it happen, especially if that means stripping us of this unnecessary baggage. Everyday we have to command our spirit to rise up and continually put our sinful nature to DEATH. We have to willingly step into that Juicer even if we know it means pain and struggles. When the pain comes don’t ask for your circumstances to be changed, stay in the pain. You have something to learn there, your character is being built. You are being stripped of all the things that you have been carrying around unnecessarily, and sometimes that hurts.
Lesson Two
The journey God calls us to on this earth is hard. It’s the road less traveled. It’s the narrow road. He knew the journey would be hard because He lived it Himself. We can see that in order for Him to make this difficult journey through life more bearable He found Himself a community of people. As followers of Jesus we are all connected together in Christ. We are a family. We have one God, one Father over all, one DNA. There isn’t any distinction among us. We are no longer different. We are unified through Christ! I cannot survive this journey through life without my inner community of people whom I can be my true self with and be completely transparent with. They are the kind of people who will help me walk a righteous life, who will serve as a mirror in my life showing me my good or bad and my successes or failures as they try to call me into who God has created me to be. I saw the importance of community plainly while we were on our hiking trip.
During that day when we had to hike over ten miles I had no idea how I would be able to do it, but every time I looked up and saw my team around me they were going through the same struggles and the same pains… yet they were still walking. Because they were still moving forward I had the strength to keep walking myself. If they could do it, so could I. If I were left alone with the map and told to meet everyone at the camp ground I would have gone twenty minutes, taken a seat on a nice log, and waited for everyone to come and find me. But because I had my team encouraging me, fighting along side me I knew that I could make it, and I did.
When life starts to spiral out of control we need a group of friends to encourage us to not give up. They may not always able to help us with our personal struggles, but just having them doing this life with us makes all the difference. They cheer us on to get up when we fall, they are our biggest fans when we succeed, they are the shoulder to cry on when we are hurt, they are the ones who will call us out if we are being foolish, they are the ones who keep pushing us to draw closer to God, and lastly… true communities consist of the people who want to see us grow and transform so that we better resemble Christ. We are relational beings. We can only keep blooming if we are in community, by ourselves we don’t make any sense. Our lives were not meant to be lived alone.
