In 1988, four friends climbed Mount Lyell, the highest peak in the Yosemite National Park. Their base camp was less than 2000 feet from the peak, but the climb to the top and back was to take the better part of the day, due to the difficulty of the glacier they had to cross to get to the top. The morning of the climb they started out all chatting and cracking jokes together.
As the hours passed, the two more experienced mountaineers opened up a wide gap between their less experienced companions. Being competitive by nature, one of the less experienced climbers began to look for a shortcut to beat his friends to the top. He thought he saw one to the right of an outcropping of rock, so he went on, deaf to the protests of his companions.
Perhaps it was the effect of the high altitude, but the significance of the two experienced climbers not choosing this path did not register in his consciousness. However, it should have, for 30 minutes later he was trapped in a cul-de-sac of rock atop the Lyell Glacier, looking down several hundred feet of a sheer slope of ice, pitched at about a 45° angle. He was only about 10 feet from the safety of a rock, but one little slip and he wouldn’t stop sliding until he landed in the valley floor some 50 miles away! It was nearly noon, and the warm sun had the glacier glistening with slippery ice. The inexperienced climber was stuck, and he was scared.
I took an hour for his experience climbing friends to find him. Standing on the rock he wanted to reach, one of them leaned out and used an ice axe to chip two little footsteps in the glacier. Then he gave him the following instructions: “you must step out from where you are and put your foot where the first foothold is. When your foot touches it, without a moment’s hesitation swing your other foot across and land it in the next step. When you do that, reach out and I will take your hand and pull you to safety.”
It sounded real good to him until he heard what his friend said next that made him more frightened than ever. His friend said, “but listen carefully, as you step across, do not lean into the mountain! If anything, lean out a bit. Otherwise, your feet may fly out from under you and you will start sliding down.”
The inexperienced climber was at a precipice and he didn’t like it. When someone is on the edge of a cliff his instincts are to lie down and hug the mountain, to become one with it, not to lean away from it! But that was what his good friend was telling him to do. For a moment, based solely on what he believed to be the goodwill and good sense of his friend, he decided to say no to what he felt, to stifle his impulse to cling to the security of the mountain, to lean out, to step out and traverse the ice to safety. It took less than two seconds to find out if his faith was well-founded and it was.
To believe in Jesus Christ, that he died and rose again, that he is God, may seem, to our natural inclination, the opposite thing that we should do. Our inclination says it isn’t possible but just like the inexperienced climber, doing something that seems impossible is the only way to be saved. Jesus Christ is loving and faithful so we can trust in him. The bible says in the book of Romans chapter 10 verse 13 ‘For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.’
P. Pilgrim pilgrimway101@yahoo.com
