Yesterday seven of us (Becks, Hannah, Monica, Haley, MB, Ally, me) went on an adventure. It wasn’t the adventure we had planned but it was worth it in the end. Kinda like life sometimes.
The day before Facebook was kind enough to remind me of something I’d posted a few years ago: The Christian life is a series of assignments from God. Sometimes God leads us in a direction that, from our point of view, appears to suddenly change or only be a side path before changing directions. In reality, the “side paths” often turn out to be the way God chose to vividly remind us of an aspect of His nature in preparation for the next assignment. So there was that in the back of my head influencing how I thought about our unplanned adventure.
We started out the day with great hopes and a solid plan. Or so we thought. At 5am we hopped on the songthaew we had rented for the day and headed for a 9h hike. When we got to the national park, we were informed that the trail was closed. Our driver didn’t speak much English and we didn’t speak Thai so communication was interesting to say the least. After going to two other places, we ended up at Bua Tong Waterfall.
We found the start of a trail and took off into the jungle. The topographical map near the trailhead was missing sections so we couldn’t tell which lines were trails and which were to show the topography of the area. Which means we set off having no idea where we were headed.
Following God can be like that. You know what the beginning of the path looks like but you can’t see what’s around the next corner. Sometimes that’s a good thing because we wouldn’t choose to keep going if we knew we would meet something potentially scary. Like this cool looking giant spider that we met twice:
Actually, it didn’t bother me so much but I wasn’t too keen on having it on me either because I couldn’t remember if it was poisonous or not. (Its body is roughly 2” in case you were wondering.) Or the stick bugs:
Or all the other bugs we encountered as we hiked. We couldn’t see all that at the start. If we had, would it have made a difference? If so, why?
If we hadn’t gone though, we wouldn’t have seen all the cool plants, vines, butterflies, and scenery.
We even came across a beautiful, semi-hidden waterfall.
And it was those things that made the hike worth it. It’s those moments when God reveals another part of His character or another level of His love that make trust and faith worth the journey.
After hiking for 1.5h, we turned around and went back to the falls. Once there, we took turns watching each other’s bags and climbing the waterfall.
There were ropes but most of the time, they weren’t needed. It was a weird feeling to be going up and down the rocks with water rushing over them and it not feel slick. Even though I knew it wasn’t slippery I tended to walk gingerly as if it might be. And there I was thinking about the journey of trust again.
God is a firm foundation – a solid rock on which we can stand. We can know that in our heads but not act in that reality because of past experiences where we built our lives on other ground that turned out to be sinking sand. (Got a song stuck in your head, didn’t I? 😉
We all have the choice to trust even when we don’t know everything or to fear what we don’t know. Fear affects so much of our lives even when we don’t think about it. Where have you allowed fear to keep you from experiencing the awesome?
