Running Strong

In his book Waking the Dead, author John Eldredge tells the following story,

We were running low of fuel, and still the fog refused to lift. Icy Straight spread out below us , beautiful and theatening. I’ve always loved the ocean, the wilder the better. But clearly, this was no place to run out of gas. If by chance we survived ditching the small plane, we’d last about seven minutes in those waters. The nearest chance at rescue lived more than forty minutes away. Great. This is just how it happens, I thought. We’ll make Reader’s Digest. “Family on vacation lost in fatal crash.” Rain and mist smeared the windshield as we strained out eyes ahead, searching for a break in the clouds. There’s no radar in these planes; bush pilots fly VFR – visual flight rules. If you can’t see where you’re going, well, then, mister, you can’t go there. And you can’t keep trying forever, either; the clock that’s running is the fuel gauge. Three more minutes, and we’ll have to turn back.

“We’ll give it one more pass.”

“Fairweather Mountain” is a total misnomer. With a name like that, don’t you picture some lovely place in Hawaii or maybe Costa Rica – balmy breezes, gentle green slopes, the weather always, well, fair? These mountains explode 15,000 feet or more above sea level, right off the coast of southeastern Alaska, sheer cliffs and foreboding glaciers. Some of the world’s worst weather hangs out there.

The pilot was yelling above the drone of the engine, “They get their name ’cause you can only see ‘em in fair weather.”

How cute. What idiot came up with that cleaverness? Raw fear had swallowed my sense of humor whole. They ought to have named them the peaks of Frozen Death or the Don’t Even Think About It Mountains. Fair weather? Around here, that means maybe twenty days a year – if you’re lucky.

We got lucky.

And I have never seen anything more breathtaking in all my life. We banked along vertical granite walls that rose and fell thousands of feet on either side, like a sparrow gliding among the Himalayas. “Are those waterfalls?” I asked, pointing to several cascades of white falling through thin air over the black cliffs.

“Avalanches. It must be warm up here today.”

Massive crevasses in the glaciers below held pools of clear water – a color I never knew existed, something between azure and cerulean blue.

“Those cracks are so big we could fly right down ‘em.”

I pretended not to hear. I felt we’d slipped through Death’s grasp, and I didn’t want to give him another swipe. The beauty that now engulfed us was enough.

Twenty clear days a year – that sounds like my life. I see what’s really going on in my life about that often. The rest of the time, it feels like fog, like the bathroom mirror after a hot shower.

You know what I mean…

What exactly are you perfectly clear on these days? How about your life? Why do things go the way they do? Where is God in all of it? And do you know what you ought to do next, with a deep, settled confidence that it will work out as you expect?

I sure don’t!

Oh, I’d love to wake up every morning knowing exactly who I am, where God is taking me, and how He is going to get me there. Zeroed in on all my relationships, undaunted in my work and ministry.

It is awesome when I do see. And God has occasionally given me brief glimpses of clarity that make is easy to take the next steps on the journey of life.

But most of the time, for me, and I would guess for you as well, life seems more like driving along with a dirty windshield and then turning into the sun. We can sort of make out the shapes ahead, and we think the light is green.

And when this happens, I am now at the point where faith steps in and I must believe that God is at work in me and for me, even when I cannot clearly see much, if any, overt evidence of His intervention and provision right now. Though scary at times, there is no other place I would rather be.

How about you? Wouldn’t a little bit of clarity go a long way right now?

(Waking the Dead by John Eldredge, p. 3-5 )