The Christian Path

Just in case anyone out there was thinking of taking the Christian path and was wondering what it’s like…

Imagine you’re walking along and you come to the foot of a mountain. It’s the biggest mountain you’ve ever seen, even in your dreams. There’s an old gate leading to a narrow, rocky path that’s overgrown in many places by tangles of weeds and vines. The path leads up the mountain. It’s dark, it’s foreboding and there are weird noises coming from within.

You decide to brave this path and begin to walk it. Instantly, things get darker and the path starts slanting sharply upward. You begin to walk with difficulty. Your feet slip on the muddy ground. You find rocks to step on but they give way under you. You grab hold of overhanging branches but they snap off in your hands. Many times you end up falling flat on your face until eventually, you’re covered in mud from head to toe.

You hear people laughing at you and realise you’ve been dragging your family and friends behind you all this time. They are tied by ropes to your middle and resisting your forward movement all the way, pulling as hard as they can to get you to stop walking. Every so often one of them gives their rope a jerk and you go sprawling backward.

Not giving up, you continue on, every step feeling like a small death. You come to a pool and decide to wash off the mud that now covers every inch of you. But the water in the pool is poisonous and leaves you with scars and blisters. You hear more laughter and look up to find a car full of young people jeering at you. They are making their way down the mountain. You realise they must live at the top, where you’re headed. But they don’t realise their good fortune in having been born and raised there; they’re getting off on the thrill of zooming their way downhill as fast as they can go. For a moment, you feel envious and a little bitter, as you don’t even have a car to make your journey uphill a little easier.

You finally find a place where the ground seems to flatten out. Off to the side, there is a little clearing where some people are gathered around a camp fire. To your delight, you discover they are just like you: they too, are making their way up the mountain path and, like you, are covered in mud and blisters. One or two are tied to family members, as you are. You sit to rest with these good people and experience the greatest joy and relief you’ve had since you embarked on this path. You make plans to go the rest of the way with them and feel encouraged on your journey.

But your family and friends don’t like your new company and begin hurling abuse at you, demanding you break away and come back down the mountain with them. You stand your ground and are beaten with fists, sticks and rocks. Finally, the ropes binding you to your family are severed as most of your kin leaves you behind and retreats back down the path you’ve just struggled so hard to come up.

Your heart aches for your lost loved ones even as your spirit is uplifted by the new friends you’ve met. You make them your family, to replace the one you’ve lost … but you know you’ll never be the same again. For there will always be a part of your heart that is sad, from now on.

Your new buddies like the same things you do, sing the same songs, wish for the same things, and for the most part you are happy with them and the journey doesn’t seem so bad. You begin to share everything together, even your deepest, darkest secrets.

Then, one of your friends, someone you had learnt to trust, turns on you without warning. They ridicule and humiliate you, convince the rest of the group that you don’t belong. Most of the group turn against you and the ones who don’t are afraid to approach you, though they continue to wish you well from afar.

Now you are all alone, with no family or friends, and the path becomes more difficult than ever. You find yourself crawling more than walking and the thought comes to you repeatedly that you must have taken a wrong turn – even though there are no turns on this road – so difficult and impossible is the way.

A few times you find places where there is water and food and even a bit of a view of the landscape below through the trees. You are tempted to stop and dwell there for a bit but each time you make the decision to do so, wild animals chase you away or a violent storm hits and destroys the cute little shack you’d built for yourself.

So you have no option but to continue upward. Finally, you come to a place where the road is blocked and there is no way around. You collapse, exhausted and depleted of every good thing, not even feeling like yourself anymore. You wonder if your loved ones were right and you have, indeed, made a mistake. If you have, in fact, gone mad.

If you have not lived through any of this, you have not truly walked the Christian path. It is not a pretty, cobbled lane with flowers in window boxes and sing-songs with plenty of cake and ice-cream. About 99% of it is an uphill climb of mammoth, delusion-destroying difficulty. It is a path designed specifically with one purpose in mind: to weed out the insincere. The one who trusts in his own ability, upbringing and connections. The one who wants to do it his way or no way. The unseasoned soul.

The Christian path is the most difficult path anyone could ever choose to travel. It heaps responsibility on your shoulders without promising any honour. It gives you the pain of the workout without the opportunity to witness the muscle you gain. It expects you to act like a king while everyone around you labels you a peasant, a slave and a fool, and then expects you to lay down your life for them anyway. It demands lemonade when it hasn’t even told you where to get the lemons.

It’s an impossible path.

Human strength cannot get you there. That’s because the path has been so designed that the ones who actually make it to the top of the mountain can do so only by a miracle. They are like birds that get chucked out of their nests by their parents and have to learn to fly on the way down, before they even realise they have wings.

Why is the path set up like this? Why is it a way that can only be got through miraculously?

Simple!

So that the one who finally crosses the finish line will attribute this feat not to themselves but to the Creator of miracles. The glory is not claimed by the one who got stuck at the road block but by the One who gave them the wings to fly over it. Not by the one who was hungry but by the One who gave them food when they needed it. Who allowed them some company to ease their loneliness. And even a nice view to boost their spirits when they were depressed and despondent, losing their momentum.

Yes, even the One who sent those wild animals and storms to chase them away from any perceived rest, so they would not give up the uphill walk until they had truly reached the end and found themselves at the real finish line – a place that would make all they had been through worthwhile because it would give rest to the deepest part of themselves, a part that no other pleasure in this world can sufficiently reach.

If you’re thinking this seems a little unfair, just consider that at any moment while you’re reading these words, a blood vessel in your brain could burst and kill you instantly. Or a car could veer off the street and plough into the room you’re sitting in, with the same result (a phenomenon that’s occurring more often these days). Things you have no control over could end your life, even as you’re making plans for your future with great precision and forethought. Even the fact that you’re alive to read these words right now is a miracle. You could have been suffocated at birth or been aborted from your mother’s body like so many unmourned infants are, every day.

So what do you really have control over?

Even when exercising free will, there is no guarantee things will go as you want them to. You could struggle every day with no results and finally die unfulfilled and unappreciated. Nothing is certain, even given the best omens.

So now I ask: Is it such a crazy, way-out thought that a person who ventures onto the Christian path, braves all its difficulties, humiliations and dangers, and finally makes it across the finish line finds it fit to credit his or her accomplishment to the Creator of the feet that took them every step of the way? Or the lungs that took in every gasping breath? Or the air that those lungs breathed?

Make up your own mind. Personally, I would rather walk a miracle-needing path and cross the finish line giving credit to the Miracle Maker, than walk an easy path that leads nowhere special, where I am one of many at the finish line and where nobody can hear my self-congratulations because they’re all too busy congratulating themselves and fighting over who had the most difficult time getting there.

And that brings me to the most important question of all: Why would anyone want to walk this path? If the Christian path is so hard, why even venture onto it at all?

*smile*

Because nobody can open that old gate and step onto that path unless they’ve first fallen in love. Only then will they have the courage to face everything that’s waiting to be faced.

Are they strong? Smart? Resilient? Resourceful? Imposing? Impressive? Heroic?

No more than anybody else.

The only criterion that befits them to take the journey and conquer the mountain is love.

In the same way as when someone falls in love with somebody, and they don’t care if that person is rich or poor, ugly or beautiful, dumb or smart, living near or far away, interested in the same things or into totally weird crap, from a lovely family or spawned from a pit of demonic vipers… If they love that person, they make a decision to adapt and overcome anything that comes their way.

So if you feel in your heart that you may be that person … that you have, in fact, fallen in love with Jesus and want no day to pass where you must be apart from Him… If you find yourself coming to His defence when people talk ill of Him and eschewing activities you would previously have embraced, in the effort to be more pleasing to Him…

…then allow me to inform you that you are one of those few who are called to open that gate and walk the path that leads on from it into dangers uncertain and joys unimaginable.

Don’t be afraid. Yeah, I said there would be difficulties but I didn’t mention the exhilarating joys. And there will be many of those! Your eyes will pop and you will feel things you didn’t even feel in your youth or childhood. You will feel connected to things you didn’t even know existed. Time will cease to have any meaning for you and eternity will be opened to you. You will grow new mental and spiritual limbs and do things you were never taught to do, and those things will end up inspiring even the very people you once looked up to.

But most importantly, you will have a relationship with the most awesome Being in history, a partner in crime to end all partners in crime. He will watch your back and be there for you when everyone else abandons you. He will be there to share your little joys and deepest fears. And during your victorious moments, when all the world is applauding you, He will be winking at you as you both remember every little moment that led you there, both pleasant and painful. You might be deceived at times and shun Him but He will never shun you. He is loyalty incarnate. He can always be counted on. He will make you a better person through inspiration as you try to copy Him, and in doing so your actions will feed the world’s hungry soul.

That’s a lot of promise for a narrow, rocky path overgrown with weeds and tangles of vines, half-hidden in the shadows behind an old, rickety gate that millions of travellers pass by every day without so much as a glance back.