​Question: Why does God lead us on deliberate paths and then sometimes, when we’re nearly there, plant a wall?  I angrily stewed on this question a couple weeks ago as I led yet another challenge expedition.
 
I knew this trip would bring extra challenge because of our current drought. This fact was especially true in selecting an itinerary that led to a waterway where I could assign individual sites for the students to spend the 24-hour solo time planned near the end of the eight-day trip. Planning strategically would be essential.

​A week before the trip, I had been studying the map and discovered a valley I had never hiked through.  The map markings indicated that a creek ran there, so a few days before my trip began, I set out to scout the area to see if it would be a suitable place for the solo time.  As I hiked, I prayed that God would provide ample water despite the lack of rain, pleasant and spacious gravel beaches for each participant to erect his shelter, and a flat, wooded glade to center our basecamp.
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My first, exploratory steps followed a dry creek bed—not a good start—but as I continued, the gravel-bottom wadi firmed into a rock-bottom stream with delightfully fresh, cold, flowing water.  Not only this, but a plethora of small curves in the creek created spots of gravel protruding down to the water’s edge, perfect for solo sites.  So far so good! I hiked on to encounter a flat, thickly forested plateau that rose six feet above the creek. It was shaded and pleasant with very little undergrowth.  I couldn’t have imagined a better place for the group’s sacred time with God.  I sensed not only the Lord’s provision and purpose, but I felt His direct invitation to commune with Him there.
  
Six teenage guys arrived on camp ready to face whatever came.  I grew to appreciate the group’s “can do” attitude as they developed the necessary skills of navigation and campcraft.  They all seemed to have a genuine faith in Christ that showed through their service and care for one another, even though the days were long, hot, and challenging.  The whole time on the trail I kept thinking about the solo area that awaited us.

One day spilled into another until we found ourselves near the end of the trip, standing upon a mountain with night setting in.  I knew that pretty creek lay in the valley below, but there was a lot of distance and darkness to contend with before any rest would come.  I trusted God’s invitation to meet Him there, but would the group persevere?

For hours I followed as our struggling party descended the mountain and observed most members growing weary, casting aside all desire to press on to the destination.  The leader of the day held the map and compass in his hands and the weight of the group on his shoulders.  He knew his general location, but couldn’t pinpoint his position.  I asked him if he knew where he needed to go.  He indicated that he did, and I coached him to set a compass bearing and follow it.  We were little more than a tenth of a mile from that sparkling, spring-fed stream after eight days of hot, arduous sojourning, and I was eagerly looking forward to refreshment that the solo time with God and my little, spring-fed stream promised.
 
With compass in hand and a definite plan, the leader struck out.  We began cutting cross-country as we followed the bearing.  Waist-high weeds and brambles, increasingly thick foliage and dense ground cover met our every step.  A little trail appeared ahead, giving momentary hope to the group, who were now dead on their feet and bitter about the bushwhacking.
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The young leader checked the glowing compass needle and kept moving into thicker, darker underbrush. When his followers protested, he stood his ground.  “The trail does not follow the bearing,” he explained simply to pacify their dismay.  So, we hiked onward and were soon forced to halt at a nearly impenetrable, 8’ hedge row wall of vines, thorns, and brambles.

Now bewildered, the leader looked back at me, and I could see the question on his face, despite the shadow his headlamp cast over it, “Should I go on?” 
“Stick to the bearing,” I urged.  That was the right answer to give as the facilitator, but even I had my doubts. Should we try to hack, cut, and crawl our way through the solid barrier of vegetation?  Our options were few, so into the scrub we went. Our progress was slow—clear a path, forge through, and then stand with the 50-pound packs on our backs while more path was cleared.
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I strained to hear that precious running water that I knew must be only yards away, but the drone of tree frogs, crickets, and mosquitoes drowned it out.  Fatigue and misery in that muggy, painful, monotonous moment added to my guilt of having encouraged the young man to continue this way.
 
How was I to know that our bearing to one of the most beautiful places in the Ozarks would be blocked with only a few strides left in the journey!  Forced to halt, pushed back, knocked down, and undone when I was so sure God had invited us to commune with Him just beyond the wall, I felt a hot anger rise in me—an anger not over the wilderness, the bugs, or my waning strength, but an anger toward God.  “Why, God, have You allowed us to come so far, to almost make it, only to have to contend with this wall?”

Then I thought of Moses, and I could identify with him.  God called Moses to lead God’s people out of captivity, but he didn’t want to; he didn’t think he had what it would take.  However, Moses obeyed, only to find that God seemed to deliberately call, invite, and direct him and the people on a specific route that numerous walls interrupted.
 
Over and over, victory and freedom were so close, but a wall stopped them.  They thought they had escaped Pharaoh but then faced the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s army gaining.  Then God parted the sea so they could cross on dry ground.  They could trust God…until their journey took them into a waterless land. They knew this wall of thirst would be their end, but again God provided.  Having received the law and a new identity at Sinai, the Israelites confidently set out to follow the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night.  But then, enemy nations blocked their way, insisting on waging war, and God was faithful.  The granddaddy of all walls became their undoing, though.  They reached the Promised Land, the land of milk and honey, but giants lived there, and the people lost sight of God’s greatness when confronted by the Canaanites.  They hit a wall, lost the faith, and trudged around the desert for forty years.  I can only imagine Moses’ despair after breaking through all the walls they had faced, only to have the people give up.  Why does it have to be so difficult?

​My little escapade in the Missouri Ozarks, trying to follow God…to serve Him, had led me to the wall of brambles in the dark of night.  It really was no comparison to the challenges Moses faced, but I was angry, nonetheless.  After all the years of inviting people to be challenged, to learn from the adversity, and to bear fruit, on this night I felt like it was just too much.  I lifted my hand into the darkness, pointed a reproachful finger at the heavenly Father, and with trembling voice spoke, “Why God?  Why lead us all this way only to make us suffer like this?  Why can’t we just get to You?”
 
“I found it!  I found the creek!” The jubilant call came at the precise moment I finished my angry accusation toward the Almighty.
 
I had been hiking at the back of the line, so I broke through the brushy wall to shouts of joy.  The young men clambered through their packs for their empty water bottles and splashed into the creek.  Never had a simple stream of water looked so good to them.  As I witnessed the anguish and fatigue of the wilderness dissolve into elation and joy, I sensed a kind word from the Lord, “Every wall is worth breaking though to get to Me.”  And, I could see that overcoming this wall added value to the victory.
 
Whether for Moses or for me, God’s not playing hard to get.  He was there with Moses and the people all the while they were following Him.  He was there for me, too, as I stood in the dark with weary legs and waning hope.  And He’s here for you today.  He has made a promise, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened,” Matthew 7:7-8.
 
We had reached the cold stream and would enjoy the beautiful solo site.  For me, though, I knew we had broken through to the presence of God.  As I let that sink in, a feeling of safety and intimacy inside His wall washed over me.  No tourists would come this way.  We would be uninterrupted during this sacred time with God now that we were hemmed in.  The journey had almost been too hard, almost made us turn back, almost destroyed our hope, but we were overcomers.  Our Father God was there the whole time…never almost, but always!

We took the summer interns on a short float trip the other day, and one of them offhandedly asked, “What’s the most memorable canoe trip you’ve had?”  My wife overheard the question, and immediately started giggling.  What follows is that story as close to true as I can remember.
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I was recovering from a discouraging knee surgery, and my wife thought it would cheer me up to take the family canoeing.  The kids were little, so it was to be a short, simple excursion down the most familiar section of our nearby river.  It would be easy to park our car at the takeout and have a friend drive us to the put-in, where we would start our afternoon’s adventure.  Being dropped off made it important to take extra precautions in not forgetting the essentials. 

Before our friend abandoned us, she called, “Are you sure you have everything?”  Focused on wrangling four small children, I paused my frenzy in lathering sunblock on our wiggly four-year-old son and dismissed her rather smugly, “I’m a professional river guide, and I think I know what I’m doing!”

​She shrugged, climbed in her car, and drove away.  I limped over to the canoe.  I hobbled around everywhere, favoring the recent knee surgery, but I tried desperately hard to conceal my limp and my feelings of inadequacy.  One thing I couldn’t conceal, though, was the oversized leg brace. It seemed to alert every good-willed person around, like a neon sign dangling from my proud neck, “This lame guy needs your help!” 

We had to haul the canoe a few yards to the water’s edge, but with my bum knee, I could not manage the short trip.  “Help Mommy carry the boat,” I ordered the children.  A stranger carrying a cooler quickly set it down and offered to help my wife and kids with the chore.  “No need,” I said.  “We do this all the time.  Besides these kids need the exercise and training.” The stranger looked skeptically at my two-year-old daughter wearing a swim diaper and water-wings.  “Yeah, I see what you mean,” he said as he walked away shaking his head.

I began tackling the one task I could do—strapping, tightening, and buckling the life jackets on the children.  Then my wife gasped, “Oh no!”  Now, an astute family man can learn to decipher the tonal qualities and variations of his wife’s words and will respond signifying that he cares for her feelings, that he is in this with her, and that she always has the right to choose the restaurant.  These nuances I was learning well.  But when it comes to jeopardizing a man’s sense of adventure or leisure, no tonal reinterpretation is necessary.  A man is prewired to know when his fun is about to be interrupted.  When she said, “Oh no!” I had a keen sense that all fun was about to depart. 

“Joel! did you grab the paddles?” I immediately knew it was worse than no more fun—I had failed. 

I deflected the question. “I don’t have the paddles.  I thought you were getting them.”  The heat of anger rose in me. I stood looking around and threw up my hands, “Wow! No paddles!  Here we are ready to go canoeing, and we have no paddles!”  I said not even trying to conceal my sarcasm. 

“Here’s a paddle, Daddy,” my six-year-old daughter offered.  She proudly held aloft a small, two-foot- long, wooden, souvenir paddle that I had brought back for her from one of my whitewater canoeing trips to the Nantahala Gorge.  The situation was a lot like the time Jesus urgently needed some food to feed the five thousand people, and a small boy offered up his meager supper—totally inadequate and completely unquestioning.  Jesus smiled kindly, took the humble offering, and fed a multitude.

I wasn’t Jesus.  I wasn’t feeling very grateful or gracious.  I looked at the little paddle and knelt down eye to eye with my daughter and said flatly, “This is a toy.  It won’t work.”  

My wife, undaunted by our lack, smiled coyly, grabbed the tiny canoe paddle and thanked our daughter.  “Let’s go!” she called. 

“You gotta be kidding me!” I said with total disregard for our child’s pathetic, paddle offering.  “We cannot go with that.” 

“Do you have any better suggestions?” she smirked.

She thought this was funny.  I was fuming.  With my bum leg and no suitable paddle, the real issue was that I felt completely helpless. 

“Are you coming?” she asked. 

I stood there, staring in disbelief at the little, red canoe now brimming with my happy family.  Trying to regain my senses, I stomped to the front of the canoe, stomped in protest as well as I could with a leg brace on, stomped till it hurt, and then limped the last few feet to sit hunched over in open displeasure at this undignified lunacy.   

We shoved off as my wife steered and slapped at the water with the tiny, toy paddle, the kids leaned over the sides, carelessly tossing pebbles into the glassy stream, and I scowled at the bow.  It wasn’t just that I didn’t have a paddle in my hand, but also that I was relegated to the front of the canoe.  No self-respecting man would reasonably place himself at the front of the boat, abdicating all steering power to his bride!  From the headwaters of the Jack’s Fork River to the mouth of the Current River, a visitor will unlikely see such a sight, but here I was, wounded and humiliated. 

From her vantage point in the stern, my wife could take in the full oddity of our circumstances.  Despite my sour attitude—nay, perhaps all the more because of it—she considered the ridiculous paddle in her hands and my pathetic, overly dramatized pouting.  Then, she did what any sensible woman would do.  She got the giggles!  She couldn’t stop, and the more she giggled the more her laughter erupted until her cackling mirth could be heard by anyone around, including the bewildered fishermen casting lines from the shore. 

“Hey, are you folks alright?” one concerned angler called. 

Over the din of my wife’s amusement, I sat upright, composed myself, and with feigned nonchalance lied, “We’re fine.  Just fine.” 

“You seem like you could use some help,” he urged. 

With renewed haughtiness, I said, “I’m a professional river guide, and we do not require assistance!” 

My wife laughed even harder.  The children by this point sat in tense confusion as they observed the marked difference in their parent’s deportment.  Dad seemed pretty fed up and yet scornfully protective of his fragile ego.  Mom, on the other hand, beat the water with a tiny stick and laughed maniacally as though she had indeed finally gone crazy. 

As I turned to command my wife to show some respect and pipe down, it was as though the Heavenly Father placed a firm hand over my mouth and reset my sight, allowing me to gaze with His eyes upon the rareness of this delightful, extraordinary episode in my life.  I suddenly realized the inordinate humor in our absurd plight.  Against my own better judgement, I grinned.  I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help myself.  My grin precipitated into a chuckle that grew to a full-on belly laugh.  We looked utterly ridiculous, certifiably insufficient, and nearly helpless, but none of that mattered.  We were together, laughing and living the adventures of everyday life. 

I almost missed it—how beautiful my wife looks when she laughs with unbound joy; how innocent with gleeful wonder are our children, peering over the gunwales toward shore as though on a jungle safari! I almost missed the bewildered faces of the fishermen who witnessed our inside joke and nearly crushed the humor of my own insufficiency in the face of such a loving, all-sufficient Heavenly Father.  It wasn’t five loaves and two fish, but I was filled as only Jesus can satisfy.

We eventually stopped laughing and just glided along at the river’s pace, feeling the deep contentment trickle through us that so often comes after a good, long laugh.  We settled into this unique float trip, quite unlike any we had done before, and we were just beginning to rest in the moment when my wife once again gasped, “Oh no!...Honey, do you have the car keys?”

​As we sang together atop the bluff and enjoyed the coolness of pale moonlight, even the whippoorwills stopped their incessant melody, although I believe their quiet was less a concession to us and more their being shushed by a mighty power.  Our audience, the Host of this outing, wasn’t interested in the second-rate singing of the birds.  He wanted to listen to our genuine, uninterrupted praise.  In that moment, I sensed my own relief and surrender.  Despite my earlier misgivings—I was too busy to be here—I had obeyed, and now I knew pure joy. 

​Spring preparation for summer camp programs keeps our staff busy.  It often seems like there’s not enough of a lot of things, chiefly time.  This scarcity drives me to work harder, feel more anxious, and lose my cool when projects develop snags and workers are unable to get the job done within my predetermined parameters. 

Basically, it’s the most inconvenient time to take a holiday, but the Lord had been pestering me for days with an invitation to get away with the camp staff and go rock climbing.  I knew this was not just my own fantasizing—a convenient excuse to shirk responsibility and go have a lark—due to the mounting pressure to have everything ready.  Ready for what?  For Discovery Ministries to take people to exciting, beautiful, wilderness places to be challenged, grow as the body of Christ, and glorify God.  I would be creating this unique experience for others, so shouldn’t I afford the time to practice it myself?

Sometimes in the midst of our striving for God, we lose the objective and settle for lesser pleasures.  We work to satisfy our own agendas and yearn to make the most of our time, according to our own definition of “most.”  Thankfully, Abba had been persistently reminding me that He is the Author of time.  Apparently, He thought I had time to draw away and climb Arkansas crags, time to be challenged, time to draw together with other believers, and time to glorify Him.  It was an earnest invitation from a loving God to a weary son.  It’s funny how I felt almost guilty mentioning it to the rest of the hard working, busy staff.  I think we all wondered if it was the wisest choice considering the mountain of work awaiting us. 

God can relate because He’s been there.  Jesus, in His finite body, modeled how to balance carrying out the most demanding work with the highest of stakes and the need for rest within our limited amount of time.  Though He worked tirelessly among the needy of Israel, He often called His disciples to follow him to quiet solitary places, to cross over to the other side of the lake, or to join Him for a festive meal.  These times in Jesus’ life help us reconcile ourselves to the fact that the God-man held within His agenda the need to draw away for rest, celebration, and intimacy with His closest followers and with His heavenly Father as a priority.
 
Jesus was committed to this rhythm, and He invites us to follow His example.  In Matthew 11:28-30, Jesus gives us this summons: “Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.”

The camp staff and I had decided to accept God’s invitation, and we weren’t sorry.  We enjoyed the feel of rough, sandstone handholds on our supple fingers as we climbed warm rock in the temperate spring air under deep blue skies.  In the evening sitting around the campfire, we told stories of God’s goodness and of past victories, warmed less by the heat radiating from dancing flames and more by remembering God’s faithfulness.  I felt a mixture of emotions and grew sober when I considered that I almost didn’t accept God’s offer.  I so often dismiss His kindness as I search for what He wants of me, all but striking R&R from the agenda in my quenchless quest to do the will of God.  I was so glad that despite myself, I had accepted His invitation this time. 

It’s important to discover that the Judge of humanity, Artisan of the cosmos, Definer of reality and truth wants nothing more sometimes than to draw us close to Him and just play, rest, worship, and enjoy life together.  Perhaps it’s good to remember that when we are the busiest for God, it is the perfect time to accept the Authority of the Ages’ invitation into a closeness with Him.  It is the perfect time to lay down our to-do list and take up His.  After all, when we spend time with the Author of time, we find that there is enough time!