After hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail with a small group of friends, Lauren, one of the girls in our party whom I had not known prior to the hike, invited me to go rafting with her on the Ocoee River where she was a guide. I had never been on whitewater in my entire life and was eager for the opportunity to try a new activity.
Lauren took me down the river one weekend in mid March. It was the beginning of their rafting season - only the second weekend of guide training. I absolutely loved it. At the end of the weekend Lauren's outpost manager, Jamie, invited me to keep coming back on the weekends to continue training. This was the gig: "be here each weekend to train, and this can be your summer job." I was a hippie with no direction who wanted to be outdoors. They were going to pay me to play on the river. So I started training.
I picked up the sport quickly. Senior raft guides spent hours pouring out their knowledge and teaching us how to guide. I was grasping the concepts of reading whitewater and maneuvering a boat while physically getting stronger each week. By May I checked out as a raft guide for Adventures Unlimited. The journey began.
This journey took an unexpected turn midway through the summer. I became a Christian. But allow me to rewind a bit.
I grew up in a Christian home attending church every Sunday. At age 8 I publicly "accepted" Christ and was baptized. In the years that followed I was heavily involved in my youth group and was a professing Christian.
But I was not.
How was I to know that I wasn't a Christian? I knew what was expected of me, I knew and recited the church's statements of belief, and in some ways the tenets of "the faith" seemed logical. But how does one know what bread tastes like until one has eaten it?
In my senior year of high school, at the age of 18, sin was ever more appealing to me. I desired things that were, at the very least, not condoned by the Christian faith, or at most, not allowed. I realized this discrepancy and felt compelled to rid myself of a major hypocrisy. I quit attending church with my mother and renounced my "faith" in Christianity.
In all those latter years of my teenage life I was tormented by the need for a knowledge of truth. But I sought it in vain places. Depression drove my soul mad, for there was no other soul in which I could confide the thoughts of my heart. After graduating high school in May of 2012, I spent most of my time smoking marijuana, reading Buddhist holy books, and daydreaming about living a life like Jack Keroac's. I wanted to be free; I wanted to know truth. But I did not know that I was a slave to my sin, my selfish desires, nor that I was blind to truth and groping about in the dark.
In the final months of summer after I graduated high school, just before I was going to be off for college, I underwent severe trials that postponed my college attendance until the Fall of 2013. It was then that I went to The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and it was in the following semester that I met Lauren and came to the river. There I met fellow-minded people. People who were poor; people who loved the outdoors; people I could smoke with, who all had different perspectives of life. I was happy, and I began to realize how all of the difficult things I had experienced had worked together to bring me to this place. A light was dawning, but I did not know it. I was however increasingly thankful for how my circumstances had turned out, and this was the thought that prompted me to see the light: if my spirit is so thankful that it yearns to give thanks...there must be someone to receive my thanksgiving. I remember the moment that thought came into my mind. I was standing in the center aisle of the bus, geared up and heading to the river. When the thought occurred me, I remember timidly shifting my gaze upward, and perhaps for the first time in my life, truly, I acknowledged God. I said, "Thank you."
I was thankful because it seemed to me that if all those hard trials had led me to a good place, perhaps when the next trials came in life I could trust God that he was working through them for my good. However, in the couple of weeks that followed that initial interaction with God I made no attempt to pursue him. I was still enslaved to my sin, because that was what I loved. And for the one wondering what exactly was my sin, it was this: my desire to fulfill my own plans, however seemed best to me, instead of submitting to the one who created me to fulfill his intended purpose for my life. And this is our purpose, manifested in a multitude of ways: to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
At the right time, I fell deathly ill with a parasite. For the first time, I smoked marijuana for its medicinal benefits; it was the only thing that helped numb the pain and give me enough of an appetite to hold down food. However, no earthen substance can cure the malady of the soul, and this was the Lord's primary concern and objective. I eventually saw a doctor who diagnosed the parasite and prescribed pharmaceutical medication, but I continued to decline in health. So much so that my mother drove across the state to bring me home for recovery. This was the Lord's doing. As I rested at home, I pondered all the ways in which God had worked in my life, and I could tell that the more thankful I was that happier I was in turn. This reminded me of Biblical teachings I'd learned as a child. So one afternoon while my mother was at work I took her Bible and sat on the back porch. I didn't know at the time why I felt so compelled to read it. But I opened it to the book of James, and as I read, the eyes of my heart were opened. My ears were made to hear. I knew, somehow like never before, in a way that I could only describe as supernatural, I knew that the words I was reading were true. I knew it so deeply I longed to submit to those words, simply because they were true.
"Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness."
"If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind."
"Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him."
"Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you."
As I began to recover from the parasite, so my soul was being mended by the Lord. In one moment of time, brief and utterly vital, he regenerated my heart and gave my soul life. He himself is life, and he came to me and made me his own. I understood for the first time why Jesus Christ was crucial. He is the Son of God, holy and pure, and by his undeserved death, he paid the debt I owe to God. Allow me to explain. If a potter makes a pot, does he not have the right to determine that pot's purpose? Does he not also have the right to destroy the pot? Yes on both accounts. No one would argue otherwise. How much more then does God rule over his creation? He made us and gave us life, and he made us for a purpose: to glorify him and to enjoy him. If we do not live out our purpose, we forfeit our life. We do, in fact, deserve to die. But God is gracious beyond comprehension. It is not his desire that we should die. But he is also a God of Justice. And Justice demands that where we have defrauded God by using our life to do as we please, we must die. That would be just. But God made a way for us to be reconciled to him. By sending his Son to die in our stead (who did so willingly out of love for us), the debt we owe God has been fulfilled. And he offers us eternal life (eternal because he himself is life and he has no beginning or end - he is God) if we will only believe. Many people do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God. They turn away from him, and in doing so, they turn to death instead of life. These are things I myself heard all the days of my childhood but never believed. Why do I believe them now? Because I believe that 2 + 2 = 4, and I believe that 90 degree weather is hot, and I believe that water sometimes pours from the sky...because I have experienced these things. If you've never eaten bread, how will you know what it tastes like? You cannot know until you eat it. And how do you eat it? You ask for it; you seek it out. Though you will find when you do it was God seeking you, moving you to seek him.
I did not intend this post to be a testimony to the things I believe. I actually intended it to be a documentation of the rivers I have run so far to date. But oh so often do I proceed from one topic to Christ. Perhaps not often enough in conversation. Lord help me to be bold and to recognize opportunities to confess truth. But when I write, it seems he pours out of my heart. This post may be a good platform from which to view my journeys as they come. God has saved me from his wrath; he has filled my heart with his love; and he has called me out of darkness that I might be an instrument to carry his love and his gospel into the world. For me this journey has begun as a raft guide. And to the raft guides I will preach Christ crucified for the world.
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