Life is a hike

There are so many metaphors, similes, and analogies for describing the faith life. I’m sure that my words aren’t original, and I’m probably just adding another imperfect metaphor for the great mystery of life. However, that is beside the point. In 1st Timothy, the author tells Timothy to continue “fighting the good fight of faith.” Hebrews calls the faith “a race that lies before us.” I would say that life is not a fight. Life is not a race. Life is a hike.

I recently went on a “silent” retreat in the hills of Kentucky at a Trappist Monastery of the Strict Observance. I put quotations around it because I wasn’t silent the whole time. There are spots to make phone calls, obviously, and there’s actually one spot that had WiFi. I wasn’t necessarily using the week to be silent, but rather as an opportunity to rid and strip all the distractions of life in order to have a Coram Deo moment with God. I went on this trip to a) have quiet time with God, b) be in an environment dedicated to removing distractions, and c) get spiritually charged for another year at seminary.

I read a lot. And even though seminary requires a ton of reading, I wanted to read at this retreat because I wanted to choose what I read. So if you’re really interested, I read Miloslav Volf’s Free of Charge, all the Pauline letters, and some of the Psalms. Oh, I also tried to get a jumpstart on my class on Luke, so I read a little bit of a commentary on Luke. Now that I’ve made this list, it doesn’t seem like much, but it felt super busy. It was jam packed for such a short time frame.

But my favorite activities that I did on my retreat were the prayer walks. I’ve done them in the past mainly praying over buildings, schools, etc, but these prayer walks were different. It’s funny. Even at a place where everyone else praying in silence and having intimacy with God, I get distracted, so I went on these walks away from the Abbey in order to get away from it all. I went from peace to peace. Normally people who go on walks do so to get away from problems. The Abbey was one of the most peaceful places that I had been to, but I still had to make a decision to walk away from it to have time with God.

Now in these prayer walks, I would stop here and there. Do a short prayer. Rest in silence.

Take a sip of water. Read a biblical passage. Talk to God. Whatever I felt like led to do I did.

But while I was thinking on these prayer walks, I thought that’s a great image for what our life is like. Sure sometimes it feels like a fight. Or like a race. But the more I think about it, my life has been more like a hike than anything else.

Okay, the obvious connection is that any good hiker must bring supplies from water to food, tent, good shoes, maybe a good book, flashlight, and I could go on. The point is that in order to hike, one must bring goods beforehand. In our life, we have to prepare for the hike ahead. We need parental guidance. We need spiritual sustenance (it doesn’t have to be a relationship with God, but that definitely is spiritual. It’s more like “what is your passion” or “what wakes you up”). You get the gist. You have to prepare for the hike of life. One time I went on a bike ride on a hot summer Sunday afternoon. I thought that it would be a short trip, so I left my cell phone and water bottle back home. I was thinking that I would go around the block and then head home, but there was this awesome breeze in the air that pushed me to ride further. This breeze kept going, and I kept going until it stopped. I had made multiple turns into places I had never been before. It turns out that I had biked about 15 miles away from home, so I found a man sitting in his truck to point me in the right direction. Well, I made it home, obviously, but now I definitely know not to go anywhere without supplies.

But the thing that really made the connection for me was walking on the path from Point A to Point B. Have you ever been on hikes where the only draw to them was the end? You know, where the trip itself is awful, but then you get to that big, beautiful waterfall. Then it’s all worth it, right? We have these moments too. Sometimes the journey itself isn’t really much of a journey. Sometimes my dad will ask me to reflect on something that I feel needs no reflection at all. It just simply is. But he wants me to draw a deeper meaning. Some of the things we go through don’t have deeper meaning while we’re in the moment. Sometimes it takes us getting to the end and looking back to see that there was indeed a thread that connected it all together.

Or maybe on that hike there all these little things until it gets to the big thing. Have you ever done those? Like every single turn and curve leads to something good. You think you’ve gotten to the end of the hike with each good thing that comes, but then it ends at this grand finale. Some things we go through are just like that. Looking back, my college experience was similar. Freshman year at the time felt like the greatest thing ever. Freedom from parents. Freedom from cleaning up after myself. All those freedoms. (Unfortunately, I went to a Christian undergrad that gave me a parent (my RA) who issued weekly room checks). And then I got to sophomore year. Now I was really living. I knew the swing of things. I could get around campus pretty easily. I would get lost a couple of times, but hey, at least I wasn’t a freshman. Junior year and senior year were like that except with a lot more stress.

Or it could be a completely dull hike. I feel like any hike under ¼ of a mile is one of those. It’ll take you to a 17th century school or an 18th century gravesite or something like that, and it’s not that those aren’t cool and all. But you’ve seen those things before. Once you've seen a cemetery, you've pretty much seen them all. You’ve been there and done that. But you still have to endure it even if it's a familiar experience. It might seem like you’ve already been down that road, but there is still something to be experienced and learned through that moment. Even if it's mundane. There is still beauty in the nothingness.

And then there’s the hike that never seems to end. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the scenery is. It just keeps going and going. My family loves to hike on family vacations, but as David and I move into our peak shapes of adulthood, our parents are well out of it. Any time we go on hikes, we’ll try to choose one that’s manageable for the whole family. However, one time, we went on a trail that was a lot longer than the trailhead indicated. I don’t remember what we saw. All I remember is that we were miserable. Sometimes we’ll go through something that never seems to end. It doesn’t matter about the end result i.e. that verse that people always seem to quote about producing discipline Hebrews 12:11.

Life is a series of hikes. We go through different seasons which are all different hikes. That's the ebb and flow of life, it seems. There are going to be beautiful mountains, rivers, and waterfalls, but sometimes we'll have to go on that rocky road to get there.

So we pick up our walking stick and go on the journey. We might be on a new journey, a trail that's never been hiked before, but more than likely, others have been down that path. We can learn from them.