A Birthday Hike, and Reminder . . .

My Day: I was blessed on Thursday to be able to take my traditional birthday hike with Mary Ann and my girls at the Pinnacles National Monument. We left the parking lot about 1 pm and got back to the van about dark. I was so proud of our girls. In the first two miles we climbed 1,500 feet of switchbacks (to the top of the peaks in the background of the pictures), and then we wound our way across the east side of the Pinnacles and back to the van through some caves for the next 6.5 miles. It was 8.5 miles in all, and the girls did it all without complaints. It was a really special time and a beautiful day. I was able to end the evening at my parents house and celebrate my birthday with our three generations all present together, by a crackling fire, eating pizza. It was a very special day!

Bethany and Daddy, nose to nose.

For those of you who have followed this blog, you may remember my posting last year at my birthday that year's traditional "nose to nose" pictures, as well as the previous years. You can see last year's in the "Esther 3" post of Nov. 5, 2009, and the year before's in the "Esther 2" post of Nov. 4, 2009. I am including this year's pictures for those of you who know our family, or would like to know more about our family. It is fun to look at the pictures and see how the girls are growing.

My Reminder: I have been struggling a lot, lately, to understand why I can believe in my head such amazing truths—not just believe, but know, because I have experienced God's hand in ways in my life there is no other explanation for—and yet have my emotions so far behind my mind. Sometimes, when I think about what I believe in just the most simple of doctrinal statements, I can't figure out why my heart doesn't leap more, or why I can be so easily swept away by anxiety, negative expectations, fear, insecurity, etc. I find some comfort in accounts from the Bible of great men and women of God who wrestled with doubts, etc., even after intense encounters with God, but it doesn't comfort me completely. I don't seek emotion to rule me, or even to drive me, and I am grateful that I can still operate by faith in what I know without the feeling, but I would love to have more of the feeling to accompany my faith . . . more of the awe and wonder and proper perspective that keeps God and everything else in its proper size and perspective in my heart.

Abigail and Daddy, nose to nose as well.

At the Pinnacles I forced myself to just stop and look up at this one rock that was at least 1000' of straight, single rock face. The sun was dropping and the rock was red, massive, and majestic! It was so incredibly huge, and I forced myself to not just say, "That's beautiful" and move on, but to pause and reflect that, since my God made that as just one fractional part of His Creation, I truly do not need to be anxious for anything. This was something God reminded me of recently, that He commands me to be anxious for nothing, and this trip to the Pinnacles helped return that to its proper perspective. Faith has an object, and our object is God, who is the author and enforcer of His Word. Sometimes, for me, I need to pause and just ponder His wondrous, glorious, absolutely huge and stunning Creation and return Him to His proper place in my mind and heart—that place where He is God, He is huge, and there is nothing that can rival His size or power or love or majesty. It is a reminder I often need, and one that God has used His Creation many times to help me get.

Note: Many of you have seen the picture of our three cows on my blog's "Pictures" page. Well, on Monday afternoon the black one had a calf and I've posted a picture here of momma cleaning the little one about an hour after birth for you to enjoy with us.

Darkness and Light — Part I

Yesterday we went to the east side of the Pinnacles National Monument with our youth group. It was a really special day. We got there a little after 10 am, and then hiked up through the natural caves created by large rocks covering parts of a canyon. At the top we stopped and did a little study by a small reservoir and then came back down for lunch and heading home.

At the top, for our study, I began by asking the youth what they could turn on in the dark parts of the cave to help them. The answer was their flashlights, or "light." I then asked what might happen if they walked in the dark without their light and we came up with answers like falling, getting hurt, getting lost, dying, etc. I then asked them, as we sat out in the beautiful sun, to turn on the dark. The blank looks said it all—you don't turn on dark, you just remove light and what is left is dark. Dark is the absence of light. Remember that for what follows . . .

When Jesus came Matthew 4:12-17 tells us He fulfilled Isaiah's prophecy that the people who live in great darkness have seen a great light. In Luke 1:78-79, Zechariah, John the Baptist's father, filled by the Holy Spirit, prophesied, "because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace." [boldface is mine]

I asked the youth what the land was like when Jesus came, and the answer, according to the Bible, was that it was in darkness. So, I asked, does that mean the sun wasn't shining? Obviously, the answer is "no." This is a description of spiritual darkness, and based on what we talked about to start—darkness is the absence of light. Who is the light of the world? Jesus. The people lived in a spiritual darkness, absent of God (they had plenty of religion, just not God).

Light and dark are big words in the Bible. In the English Standard Version there are 88 different uses of a variation of the word "light" or "dark" in the Gospels, alone—and almost all of them have to do with light in the sense of illumination, not weight. If it is true that darkness, in a spiritual sense, is the absence of God, then we would expect to find Hell described like that. Sure enough, in multiple places, it is the place of "outer darkness." To the contrary, if God is light and light chases away darkness, then we would expect to find Heaven a place of tremendous light. Hence the words of Revelation 21:22-25, "And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there." [again, boldface is mine]

So, darkness is the natural state without the addition of light. When we walk in darkness we get lost, hurt, and even die. This is the condition of man until the light comes in and shines in the darkness. I'll talk more about darkness and light and walking in them in the next post, but for this one simply reflect on the fact that, absent of light there is darkness. It is the natural condition. You don't need to do anything to make it dark. You do need to apply light to remove the darkness. So many people who don't know Jesus seem to believe that they are on a road and one day they have to choose Heaven or Hell, God or not. The reality is that all are on the road to Hell. It is not one we choose. It is our natural path. We are all absent of God and in the darkness. We must choose to apply the light to get out of the darkness, and that light has a name. It is not some mystical idea of "light" or "God." It is Jesus who said, "I am the light of the world."