“The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know what makes them stumble.” Proverbs 4:19
One hour and thirty-six minutes. That’s my record time hiking the steep trail in Shadow Canyon to South Boulder Peak and back. I don’t make that climb anymore. My bad knees can no longer take the pounding of ascending and descending a rock and boulder strewn trail that rises 3,000 feet in altitude in just a couple of miles.
But years ago I used Shadow Canyon two or three times a week for conditioning. And it worked. I got faster and faster, until I could skim over the rocks and large boulders like a mountain goat fleeing a predator. Most of the time I did my workout in the morning. But one day I arrived in late afternoon and calculated that I could make it back by dusk.
I forgot one thing, however. The trail is at the base of the canyon and there’s a reason why it’s called Shadow Canyon: it gets dark inside that canyon much earlier than sundown. This fact didn’t hit me until I was about a third of my way back down the canyon. Suddenly I realized that I was finding it hard to see the boulders in front of me and I had no flashlight.
And then sheer terror hit me: in just a few minutes, I would be all alone in total darkness. I was going to have to feel my way on my hands and knees over and around every single rock, boulder, and fallen tree all the way down the trail, like a blind man reading a giant braille book.
Fortunately, just when the last hint of blue sky above me was about to disappear, I noticed a comforting flash of light at the base of the canyon. A park ranger saw my car parked alone at the trail head and came looking for me. I was so relieved I wanted to hug the guy.
I think about that experience whenever I read passages in the Bible that describe life apart from God as walking in darkness. Living in a modern world like we do we seldom experience pure darkness in the wild and we don’t realize how frightening that predicament was for people in ancient times. Being caught walking at night in darkness was a real concern for them. They had no long lasting sources of light. And those they had were of poor quality.
Our modern world may be great at lighting our nighttime pathways, but it’s growing increasingly incapable of lighting our moral pathways. Apart from God, everyone does “what is right in their own eyes.” The result: people are finding it much more difficult to see the consequences of their moral choices. They keep stumbling again and again over the same bad decisions. The world calls this “drama,” as in, “There’s a lot of drama in their life.”
But the Bible calls it “walking in darkness,” as in, “You turned your moral light switch off and now you can’t find your way back to turn it on again.”
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
For the past sixteen years New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry
Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.
_______________________________________________________________
Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
_______________________________________________________________
