The Trail of Brokenness

Wilderness Tour - 2015 Meditation Opener

For over sixty years I knew who I was responsible to. As a young boy, it was my parents. When I reached school age, it was a mix of parents and teachers and eventually coaches. At church, I knew to be responsible to my Sunday School teachers and pastors. My earliest recollection is being in some long ago torn-down LCPC classroom with Mr. LaClair as my third grade teacher.

Though I’d grown up in the church, it was man’s authority I submitted to and never realized that I’d put them in the way of a real walk with God. Not until my basketball dreams blinked out and I looked down the pathway and into fog did I make a conscious decision to put Jesus on the throne of my heart. From there He led me to churches and schools that I had no idea would be along the path he wanted me walking. He led me to a girl who became my wife whom I’d known but had never considered for the role of 'partner in life', a role she should be rewarded for again and again.

With the new life came a new order, a divine order that I willingly submitted to then and re-submit to every time I search for a new direction. It was defined. I knew where I was to serve, who it was that I was serving, and basically, within a structure that I could easily identify. I have had a life of youth ministry of one level or another since before I made the decision that enthroned Jesus in my heart – 45 years of youth ministry, give or take a year or so with a wrong turn or two thrown in.

My term of service had come to resemble a deeply rutted road leading off into the distance, one where the fog had been creeping in and obscuring the trail for a long time. All that structure began to erode, things and mechanisms that I’d come to rely on wore down. It began to break away when I exited Student Ministries where I’d been ensconced for sixteen, maybe seventeen years. I knew where I’d be every PEAK or TNT night, every Sunday Morning, all the Parents’ Nights Out, Mission Arizonas, special events, and committee meeting nights. It was nice and neat, an orderly life of service.

When I made the exit from full-on Student Ministries involvement I stepped into uncertainty. I still had a boss at work, a family at home, and Jesus as King but I wondered some, trying this line of service and that, asking Jesus where I should go, what I should be doing, and finding myself in a spiritual wilderness.

Eventually I came to believe that my Lord wants me to write. I have a story to tell. He gives me insights that can help others and myself. It is the hardest thing He’s ever asked me to do. There are no built in structures, only a few people expect much in terms of my writing and most of those who do are my motorcycle riding friends, I know that it’s touched some of them. Being my own boss sometimes makes me feel like I’m performing with a net.

I often need to remind myself that if only one person, even if it is only myself, reads what I’ve written and comes closer to Jesus then I’ve served a purpose and advanced the Kingdom of God.

The accountability system is internal and I feel like I’ve been failing at it. Since I stopped working at AT&T I bill myself as a self-employed, unpaid writer but there are too many days that have gone by that have not seen either of my blogs active and nor have I advanced either of the books I have underway. The distractions are many; work on the house, electronic games, life’s business responsibilities, and the like. I was hoping for a divine rush of enthusiasm that would carry my book to a first-draft conclusion within the first year of my retirement. It has not arrived. Don’t pity me here. I’ve been making strides and improving my process. Jesus is re-engineering my way of living.

Let me wrap this up with my personal expectations for the 2015 Wilderness Tour. I have a mediation line that I use from time-to-time. I’d like to share it with you from my main character’s perspective since it so closely relates to where I am right now that my head spins. I wrote this part into the story months ago.

I start out closing my eyes to imagine myself walking along a trail very much like a trail in what I remember as the Paradise Valley alongside the stream rushing down the hillside there. I imagine myself walking along until at some point or another I meet Jesus, kneel in front of Him, confess and worship Him. Sometimes we walk along together talking and discussing things just as we will walk together today on our selected trails. We converse and somewhere along the line he leaves me transformed and ready to move on.

Bishop Pass Trail

My protagonist has used this same meditation only he is in a bad place at this point in his story. He’s in a wilderness that is stark and devoid of much life. He passes through the Paradise Valley failing to encounter Jesus and marches on to a trail leading upward, above the tree-line. He is struggling up a series of switchbacks, rocks obscure his path and Jesus has still not made an appearance. He grows desperate. He’s already mad at God for a great loss that he’s suffered. Finally he comes to a rockslide that has obliterated the trail and he cannot pass. The rocks and boulders on the trail are labeled; sin, anger, unbelief, drunkenness, and a few others that he can’t even recognize as being his own. He knows that in the saddle of the pass above awaits Calvary’s Cross and he needs to get there once again to be the man God wants of him. He goes to his knees and digs out the rocks and moves them out of the way.

This is my hope; that I come to the obstructions and move them out of the way in submission to the King. I fully expect this to happen during the week. It will come during quiet moments alone on the trail, sitting in fellowship with you, and while joking around at the trail’s end with my friends.

In His grip, jerry

 

PS: During that first day’s hike a few of us came to a little rest stop and I found what I was looking for along the trail. I knelt down, bowed my head for a moment and picked up a moderately sized stone from the path and moved it aside and out of the way. The stone represented a habitual gaming regimen, a huge time waster and distraction. On subsequent days on the trails I would line up my footfall to a rock in the path and scoot it away as I walked on, symbolically moving things out of the way in my personal walk with God.