“It would be just another illusion to believe that reaching out to God will free us from pain and suffering. Often, indeed, it will take us where we rather would not go. But we know that without going there we will not find our life.” — Henri Nouwen
I have always been an adventurer at heart. As a child, I always imagined traveling to far off places; exotic places; places filled with the bizarre and wondrous, enough to fascinate and tantalize the imaginations of my youthful exuberance.
Unfortunately, the most “exotic” place my childhood could muster was my grandparent’s farm in Western Wisconsin. While it is true that when one thinks of the word “exotic”, Wisconsin is not the first destination that leaps to mind, for me my grandparent’s farm held great fascination. For beyond the red painted barn with its hay fort potential; there existed innumerable places throughout the farm that allowed our imaginations to take flight. Sometimes literally!
There was the cliff behind the barn where my sister Peggy, imagining herself to be Olympic skier Suzy Chapman, sought to find out if ski jumping was really truly her calling in life. It’s just too bad that she forgot to factor in the barbed wire fence at the bottom of the hill. There was the old thrashing machine that sat for many years in the back pasture; a farm implement turned jungle gym, upon which my cousins and I imagined ourselves to be pirates, or submarine crewmen until the reality of a wasp’s nest nestled in the heart of the great beast drove us screaming back to the house for comfort and above all, First Aid.
And I would be remiss in failing to mention the family pond. A pond into which my grandfather had stocked the only kind of fish he would ever eat and where we would spend hours paddling an old rowboat up and down and around its murky waters. And then there was the forest on top of the hill in the back forty where my grandfather and I would hunt in winter time for that elusive buck that never seemed to show up when I was around. It was in this pastoral and picturesque forest that one was likely to come across an old logging road that was used by the electric company to haul out felled logs when a swath was cut through the forest to build the power poles that carried electricity to the farm and beyond.
And for whatever unexplained reason, I found that old logging road to be a fascinating find. For there, nestled in the oaky splendor of the backwoods; hidden from the view of passersby; unknown to any or all who would care to appreciate its existence, was this road in the middle of the forest. A road once so vital, so necessary to those who labored to accomplish a difficult task, whose names we’ll never know nor investigate. A road that once hummed with the sounds of equipment; a place where the voices of men raised in laughter, or concern once heard bouncing between the echoes of the trees, now remains but a memory in this place of quiet repose. A road, whose tracks once carved clean by the repetitive motion of an unending parade of vehicle travel, is now overgrown with forest grasses, plants and flowers of every description, bent by soft and gentle breezes wafting with familiar sound through the stirring leaves.
Fallen tree trunks, split by the power of long past storms litter its path with infrequency creating roadblocks for imaginary traffic. Light and shadow dance in brilliant splendor from the crowns of the towering foliage to the forest canopy below. And yet the unhindered yearly overgrowth has not been able to hide the faint and shapely outline of this long forgotten double-tracked thoroughfare.
This road, this lonely forgotten road, remains in my imagination as the perfect metaphor for the road down which each believer is confronted when he or she first encounters Christ by faith, it is the road of discipleship.
I have come to see discipleship as a lonely road not only because it is a largely untraveled road by the church in America today, but also because I’ve come to discover that when you walk this road you will inevitably find that you are traveling it all alone. This truth is borne out of the teaching of the Scripture itself; demonstrated by the life of the Apostle Paul. For in A.D. 65, Emperor Nero sought to lay blame upon the Christians for the burning of the city of Rome. And in an effort to deflect his own responsibility in creating such havoc, the Emperor had Paul arrested in the first empire-wide, state-sanctioned persecution of believers.
In 2 Timothy 4 Paul laments the fact that his imprisonment caused many Christians, even some of his closest friends in the ministry to abandon him. For they had seen the blood in the water and in a mad dash to preserve themselves from harm by association with Paul, many distanced themselves from him. Thus, Paul found himself all alone.
Yet I’ve made a remarkable discovery, as I think Paul did about discipleship that one only seems to know; truly appreciate and crave the presence of God, when they experience the seemingly metallic and hopeless emptiness of true loneliness. This was true of Paul, for when in prison he had been forsaken by his friends, he was encouraged with the reality of the faithfulness of God’s presence when he writes, “At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me… Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me.” (2 Timothy 4:16-17) It is only when you’ve been forsaken that you can truly value the continual acceptance and presence of God.
And it is here that discipleship begins to make sense of the pain we experience on this road. And that is that when Christ asks us to follow him down the lonely road, he does so because he knows that this road is never perpetually lonely since his presence has the capacity to do what none other can do. His presence fills every fissure of our brokenness; it enlightens every dark and foreboding place; it heals every open wound created by a hate-filled world in rebellion towards God.
Thus, Jesus can ask us to walk down this road without hesitation; not because he is sadistic by nature, but because he knows that in the end, the journey which he asks us to make is one that he himself has already made; and it’s really a beautiful and wondrous gift, given by a benevolent God who only seeks our good for his glory. For those who have the courage to walk this bitter-sweet journey of faith find in the end unspeakable joy and adventure, enough to satisfy even the most ravenous of human hearts. And what could be better than that?