My wife Chris and I recently returned from a three week vacation out West, where we camped all over Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Colorado, and enjoyed visiting my family in the little town in Colorado where I grew up. We were once again amazed at the immensity of space in that region. Because of the clear and dry air, one can see objects in sharp detail all the way to a horizon which is sometimes as much as a hundred miles away. We watched majestic thunderheads marching in the distance for hours before they ever began to approach our camp. We marveled at the windswept sky painted on a background of vivid blue with cirrus clouds at forty thousand feet. We shivered at the wind groaning and sighing on the margins of the world, joined in the voiceless chorus by the far off whining of truck wheels. Sometimes in Wyoming we would drive for tens of miles before encountering another vehicle. Our footfalls were closely watched and listened to by deer, antelope, elk, bison, bear, moose and eagle. Renewed in me were memories of the initial stirrings of my human spirit when it first began to awaken to the reality of God. "For since the creation of the Universe His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made." (Romans 1:20)
The high point of the journey was to have been a return to the Indian Peaks wilderness area of Northern Colorado where years ago we climbed rough, jagged-toothed mountains which reached nearly to fourteen thousand feet. Chris and I used to come to this place to hike before we were married, and sometimes were the only ones parked at the trailhead, and would spend all day walking above timberline without seeing a soul. I came full of expectation to renew the link with my past. We were greeted this time by a line of vehicles waiting to pay a park ranger a sizeable fee simply to enter the area. He instructed us where we could park, what we could and could not do. Cars were jammed into the trailhead parking lot to the point where we could not find a place to park. We finally got out on the trail and were looked down upon by youthful hikers because we were not wearing the appropriate footgear for hiking. Some young environmental advocates instructed us to be careful not to spoil "their trail". When we had had enough of this, we returned to our van disheartened. I was tempted to become bitter when the Spirit of the Lord began to speak up on the inside of me. His message was something like this, though not in so many words: "Do not be downcast at the vanishing of this physical wilderness. There are limitless frontiers to be discovered and explored in My heart. Only a handful have traveled that road, and where I am you will never be crowded out. Follow along where Jesus blazed the trail, and where other saints through the ages have dared to tread. Intimacy with Me will become the new inexhaustible frontier which drives your human spirit longing to breathe the fresh clear atmosphere of spiritual freedom."
And so I am determined to follow this calling of God, to lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles me, and to run with endurance the race set before me, fixing my eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of my faith, who has gone into the heart of God as my forerunner, and has left a narrow yet clearly marked trail to travel. And I am absolutely confident that there is plenty of room for you also in the heart of God. The Bible is the trail guide, and we have excellent footgear to wear, the shoes of the gospel of peace. Step out of the crowded parking lot of man's dead religion, and come up to where God is through the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit.
@ copyright 1995 by Scott H. Northrup. All rights reserved.