The following comes from Walt’s book, Lighting Your Way, With Love
Hiking out of a canyon can be exhausting. At the start of the journey, when you have your most energy and enthusiasm, you go down the trail. Gravity helps. Though the descent can be tough on your knees and calves, the rest of your body willingly participates in going deeper. But you must exercise caution and restraint. There is a truism that canyon hikers extol: what goes down must come up!
On your way out of the natural ditch, the task is exponentially harder. Now tired, you need to reach deep within yourself. On the hike back up, when gravity is not your friend, you have to summon strength and focus with your whole body, mind, and spirit—all ya got!
There is a similar experience at the end of a long-distance race. You get tired after running for a couple of miles. Your strength wanes. For that final push to the finish line, you need to concentrate and find the courage to keep going.
When life changes on us, the journey metaphors of canyon hiking and distance running are highly applicable. Grief, which always comes when we lose the people and patterns of life that are familiar to us, makes a body weary. We are en route to a new place, but the canyon rim or finish line is still far off. The struggle tempts us to stop and not go any further. But we can't quit. So we press on through the general confusion and uncertainty of being in a place where things are different. Amidst it all, making decisions can be a particular challenge.
My experiences with distance running and canyon hiking have taught me that when a trail requires me to make difficult decisions at a moment’s notice, I need to rely on my inner sense of right and wrong. I need to make a quick withdrawal from my ethics bank.
Shared social values, natural law, experience, and generally accepted moral principles all come together to form our ethics. As Christians, our faith also plays a critical role. Although a constant work in progress, ethics are more fixed than not. We may apply a particular ethic in different ways, depending on a situation. Still, ethics are not easily changed based on a whim or even a feeling. Ethics guide us; they are among the few constants in our life.
In each chapter of this book, I will hold up a different ethical principle that can not only help drive our decisions but also inform our sense of right and wrong. Since we are focusing in this chapter on God, it is fitting that our first driving ethic centers on the foundational relationship that we have with God.
God created us and gave us life. Scripture invites our proper response to be “all in.” As the created, we are expected to worship the Creator with all that we have. It lies at the heart of all the commandments: Love the LORD your God with all your heart, mind, and soul. In short, let all your being give praise and acknowledge God as God.
When we do this, we recognize our place in the big picture. We are not God, nor are we at the center of the universe. This understanding drives an ethic that refuses to elevate our needs and concern above all others. We are part of a more massive creation. Our wants are not placed above all other desires (or needs) because we think that would be a good idea. We are not the end of every means, nor are we the means of every end.
When we put God at the center, our ethics and decision making are no longer stuck on what is best for us. With humility, we seek to honor God. With thanksgiving, we acknowledge that life is full of blessings that we can only correctly understand as gifts. With acts of worship, we orient ourselves in a right relationship with our Creator.
At the moment we find ourselves in the heat of a day, or at the breaking point of a journey, our pretensions of being at the center of the universe fade away. Through frailty, imperfections, exhaustion, and vulnerability we claim our place as creatures of a loving God. We seek entrance into a right relationship with God and discover that not only does that relationship already exist, but God has already been carrying us along.
A PRAYER FOR YOU:
Gracious God, give me the wisdom to worship you above all things. Guide my actions so that I might give all I have in praise of you. Help me when I struggle to make a decision. Let me consider others before myself. Empower my response, generosity, compassion, and kindness. Through Jesus Christ, amen.
Today’s reading comes from Walt’s first book, Lighting Your Way, With Love. He wrote it on the occasion of his son leaving for college. It is a devotional book about transitions, faith, and living as a child of God.
© 2019 Walt Lichtenberger. All rights reserved.