Hesitation

Matthew 7:14 ... narrow is the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

This is part 4 of a story to help me process ... and discover Freedom. (continued from part 3- Revelation)

(Part 1- Where am I?; Part 2- Discombobulation)
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The way got difficult fast.  I was far enough along that I could no longer see where the trail had started.  I could clearly see the tree and the meadow around it and the river below.  I closed my eyes quickly.  Don't look down, don't look down.  I have never been afraid of heights, but I was testing the scope of that fear.  I scooted, slid, climbed and felt my way along.  Sometimes I was side stepping with my face to the cliff, other times I was facing outward.  The way was difficult.  It is funny how at times like these you find your voice to pray.  Oh God, don't let me fall.  Every once in awhile the ledge trail I was on ended and I had to climb up a few feet to get to where the trail continued.

I chuckled to myself.  The Bible says that the road to life is narrow and difficult.  When I pictured how that would physically look, it wasn't too unlike the trail I was on now.  Which made me chuckle again considering I was still in my own mind.  I was determined to press on no matter how difficult it became.  I had no intention of returning to the meadow below.  It is funny how easy it is to continue forward when you've made that determination.  So on I went.

There was no easy way to measure time, the sun still wasn't moving, but I was far enough along now the tree was a distant smudge in the green that surrounded it.  Every now and then I would pick up or kick off a loose rock and watch it tumble through air ... 1 one-thousand, 2 one-thousand, 3 one-thousand, 4 one-thousand, 5 ... I saw the distant splash quickly disappear in the fast moving water.  Man, I was high up.  I tried to look above me, the face of the cliff continued upward at least the same amount as it did downward, but the angle was so awkward it was hard to tell.  As long as there was a trail, I would continue on.

As I got to another point where the ledge I was on ended, the trail above was higher than it had been before.  It was above my head this time and I had to stretch to reach the lip.   It was amazing how much more constricted my body movements had become.  If I was on the ground below, I would just jump and shimmy my way up.  Here, though, I couldn't even bring myself to jump and peek over the edge.  I surveyed the ledge and cliff face looking for a good foot and hand hold.  They were there, but just too high to get started without fear of falling.

I remembered a small boulder I had stepped over down the path and went to retrieve it thinking it would be a good stepping stone to help in the climb.  It was too awkward to carry on this small ledge, so I ended up scooching it along with my feet, stopping regularly because of the workout.  I eventually got it to where the ledge ended and stepped up.   It was just enough where I could pull myself to my tippy toes and peek over the edge.

The area opened up quite a bit.  It was a huge indentation in the cliff face and had a wide flat shelf, almost like a porch.  From the small boulder I was standing on, I could easily reach some foot holds to push myself higher.   I stopped momentarily with my chest resting on the new ledge and my feet dangling behind me.  Oh God, don't let me fall.  I fought the rest of the way up and quickly stepped away from the edge and sat down.  It was surprising how secure and relaxed I felt even though the drop off was only a few feet away.  I savored the moment and rested.

After short minute, I stood to physically explore what my eyes had already surveyed.  The trail continued on into a crevice.  It was not straight back, but at angle opposite from the trail that came up the cliff face.  After about a twenty foot corridor the trail turned back into the cliff and disappeared into a hole.  And when I say disappear, that's what it did.   The darkness was so black, the sun light barely penetrated inward two feet and then nothing.   I reached hesitantly inward, my hand feeling along the cave wall, my foot staying firmly in the sun lit portion.   It seemed like the path continued on, but my heart raced at the thought.

I stepped away to reevaluate my surroundings; to make sure I didn't miss another ledge or trail.  There was definitely nowhere else to go.  I looked above me for another ledge, and even peeked over the edge I came up, to see if there was something there.  I suppose I knew I wouldn't find an alternate route.  I walked back to the cave mouth.  The opening was big enough, that it looked like I could walk upright comfortably.  But who knows what happened inside the cave after that first step.  I found my self in a cold sweat as I thought about walking into the darkness of my own mind.  My breathing was shallow and my heart felt like it was beating unevenly.  I was scared.  All the confidence and determination to continue forward was gone.  And for the first time since I set my foot onto this difficult path ... I hesitated.


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continue to part 5- Veritas Liberabit Vos

Revelation

I don't think we know what freedom is.  I don't think I know what freedom is.

I can tell you what freedom means.  I can even appreciate freedom.  But do I understand it or grasp it?

This is part 3 of a story to help me process ... and discover Freedom. (continued from part 2- Discombobulation)

(Part 1- Where am I?)
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When I sunk to the ground I became acutely aware of where I was, like a fog dissipating on a clear day.  I was in my own mind.

I didn't recognize it at first and it no longer looked the same, but it was definately familiar.  A long time ago, I began to come to this place in my mind when I prayed.  A quiet peaceful seclusion where I could speak frankly with Jesus.  I remember the first time I pictured it was in a vision of a sword falling from the sky and landing on the top of the hill, the blade buried in the soil.  God was asking me to take up the sword, in much the same way of a young Arthur.  To take up my calling.  I struggled a long time before accepting what the sword represented.  I had many conversations with Jesus there, with the sword in the background.  Many one-sided arguments and excuses.  With such an intimate encounter with God, that place became where I would go when I prayed.

The tree wasn't there originally, nor was the creek.  They were there in subsequent pictures and visions when I way praying.  Sometimes I would be under the tree chatting with Jesus next to me.  Sometimes we would be on the hillside playing catch with a football, or even a couple times with trac-ball.  The tree ever present, but with much more life than what I was seeing now.  The creek had been more of a babbling brook, gently flowing in the background, with rocks and boulders that it meandered its way past.  Now, I was looking at a dead tree and an unpassable river.

The cliff face came much later.  I had gone through a period in my life where there was a unknown future.  I had often explained it as a "Black Veil" I couldn't see past or beyond.  That black veil was encroaching this prayer place.  At some point during that time, the cliff face was present when I went to meet Jesus there.  I had never explored this area in my mind like I had just done.  When I was there, what was before me was clear and crisp in my mind, but the distance was a blur, like an artist painting something up close and using dots and squares and lines of paint to represent whatever's in the distance.

More recently, when I visited this place it felt different.  It was like I was visiting a place from my childhood and it felt awkward to be there as an adult.  Since moving to Hawaii, things have been different.  God has exposed things in my life that are not of Him, and has encouraged me to discover more.  Sometimes I have been eager and sometimes I have not been eager.  To be aware of fruit in your life like anger or addiction is one thing, but to seek out and discover the root of that fruit, so you can remove it, can be overwhelming.

In an eager moment, I invited my pastor and his wife to come and pray with me and my wife through some of these roots.  To help "guide" me in discovering them.  Afterward I was emotionally spent.  For the first time in my life I could clearly see the chains that bind me.  And they were huge, like the chains from a massive draw bridge on a medieval castle.  What do you do with chains like that?  It was also revealed that I was trapped in some way.  While we were praying, our pastor's wife had a picture of a wall that was holding me in and I immediatly pictured the cliff face that was present in my prayer place.  The more I pictured this place the more I came to recognize I didn't know if I was or wasn't trapped.  I had never felt like I couldn't leave, but I had never tried.  As I described to her my place of prayer, she prayed that God would reveal a way out.

Here I was, seeing clearly for the first time what my refuge had become and realizing I was trapped.  As I pondered this, it was easy to wonder how something that was from an intimate encouter with God could result in a place of confinement.  I came out of my reverie and stood.  I turned my back to the hill and the tree.  Before me was a ledge trail that went up the cliff and away from this place.  Obviously the way out we prayed for.  With a new found eagerness, I set my foot on the path to freedom.


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continue to part 4- Hesitation

Discombobulation.

This is part 2 of a story to help me process ... and discover Freedom. (continued from part 1- Where am I?)
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I decided to follow the river down stream.  As I walked I thought through what I had seen and what I could remember.  This experience was to real too dismiss as a dream or fantasy, but my mind felt hazy enough to outright accept this as reality.  I was tempted to pinch myself again, but the pain was still a fresh memory.  The roar of the water brought me out of my reverie as I walked closer to the cliff.  I couldn't see any water coming down the cliff face and wondered at the noise.  Each step seemed to amplify it exponentially.  I tried to continue my thoughts about where I was, but the noise was drowning them out.  My curiosity of the sound soon became greater than my curiosity of my circumstances and as I approached where the river met the cliff I could think of little else.

It was an odd noise.  It was definitely water related as it had the sound of crashing water that a waterfall would make, but it also had an eerie warble or echo to it that sounded out of place.  As I got closer my left ear developed a distant hum thump.  I could only describe it as if it couldn't make sense of the sound waves it was hearing.  I could see now the river did not continue along the cliff, but disappeared.  With this new information I quickly concluded, as the mind can do sometimes, that the waterfall went into the cliff somehow and the weird out of place sound was an echo of some sort from crashing into a cavern.

The volume seemed to max out and as I neared, the hum thumping disappearing as my mind now understood the sound.  It was still loud, but I was used to it enough that I could formulate thoughts once again.  The hole in the cliff face was about the width of the river and barely taller than it.  It looked like the river crashed so hard into the cliff face it made its own hole to continue on.  There was no splashing or over-spray, the water simply disappeared and crashed somewhere below the sound echoing from the mouth of the cave.  In fact, now that I was standing next to the cliff face, the sound was actually quieter, as if the echoes were only shooting outward from the cave mouth.

There was definitely no way to cross the river.  Besides the water moving too fast and being extremely cold, there was not a way I saw to climb up the far bank.  More likely I would get sucked into the over hang of one side or the other and end up down the hole I was looking at now.  Even if somehow I were able to cross, so far I had seen nothing but prairie and it would be a long walk before I discovered anything else.  I decided to walk along the cliff face back to where it met the upper portion of the river.

I looked up towards the top of the cliff and it was even harder to make out than before.  The sun was still shining bright and the sky was such a brilliant blue it was hard to look at.  Every once in awhile I would see a small lip and a nice handhold in the cliff face that I would stop and try to climb.  The highest I made it was about 10 feet and then I would get stuck or panic that I was too high.  It was unrealistic that I would be able to climb to the top anyway, but it was fun to try.  The height of the cliff was hard to fathom.  1000 feet seemed too high of a guess, but anything less seemed too little.  At such an awkward angle, standing at the bottom, I just accepted it as being really really tall.

The tree at the top of the hill caught my attention now and then.  I sat to rest once and just stared at it.  I couldn't tell what kind of tree it was.  I thought maybe if it was still alive it would probably be a fruit tree of some sort.  Even though it looked dead it had a lot of character to it.  The kind of dead tree you might read about in a book or see in a movie.

Now that I was well away from the water falling, the noise was all but gone.  And now that I thought about it, there wasn't any other noises.  No rustling of wind, no buzzing of insects, no sounds you would imagine to exist being outside.  My footsteps barely even made a sound in the soft grass, if any at all.  I suddenly clapped, the silence weirding me out.  The sound echoed off the cliff face, but dissipated quickly.  I yelled.  It was the first time I used my voice since opening my eyes.  My throat was scratchy and an awkward sound escaped, but similarly echoed and faded quickly.  I cleared my throat and yelled again, a barbaric yawp one might say.  The echo didn't last long once again.  I had a thought about the grass acting as a sound absorber, and thought about it sucking the sound out of the air in the same way it seemed to have sucked the life from the tree.

Continuing on, I hummed to myself having found my voice and even sang a little.  Now that I was aware of the absence of noise, it was eerie and I couldn't walk too long in the silence before filling my head again with some sort of noise.  I thought randomly about different things.  Each thought seemed fleeting and I found myself avoiding any sustained thought about where I was.  Almost like I was reserving any further pondering until I had seen and explored what ever there was to see and explore.

I was far enough past the hill now, I could see that the river was wrapping around towards the cliff and I was where it met the cliff face in short time.  From here, as far as I could see up stream, the river followed the base of the cliff.  Other than that, the river looked exactly the same.  Flowing quickly, and disappearing under the far bank.  Along the cliff side the water had warn away enough rock, there was a slight over hang there too.  Cautiously approaching the bank on my side, I laid down to get another drink as it had been quite awhile.  For some reason, seeing the water again made me thirsty.  Satisfied and refreshed, I stood and rubbed the cold out of my hand.

Although still quiet and muted, the periodical splash of water was a welcome sound.  I already liked this side of the river more than the other side and certainly more than the silence in the middle.  The grass rose and inclined a little where it intersected the cliff and river, and upon further inspection I could make out a little ledge.  I walked to the ledge and from here could see the water was about 6 feet below .  The ledge was about 12 inches wide, narrower in some places, wider in others.  It looked like it was naturally occurring, uneven and steep.  I could make out a couple of places where the trail was broken by a ledge, but continued on above it.  I tried to follow it with my eyes, but besides going up, I couldn't make out much more as it blended in with the rest of the cliff face in the distance.

I considered my options.  Following the trail was the obvious choice.  At least to go as far as I could and see where it went.  It was definitely narrow and the way looked difficult, but having followed the river to the waterfall and having walked the entire face of the cliff, I couldn't image what else I would do.  I looked at the sky to gage how much more daylight I would have and stared in surprise.  The sun hadn't moved at all.  I had the impression it was moving earlier, but now that I was thinking about it, that was more from me moving and it's relation to the cliff face.  As I thought more purposefully about time, I realized it hadn't moved at all.  Time had certainly passed, I guessed it had been a couple of hours since I opened my eyes, but the sun hadn't moved.  My mind wrestled with this inconsistency and I sunk to the ground confused.

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continue to part 3- Revelation