Wild at Heart.
“The thing about remembering is that you don't forget.”
— Tim O’Brien
Years ago, when I was in elementary school, my family took a vacation up to Mount Rainier in Washington. We took a hiking trail up the mountain, and some time after reaching the top of the trail, my parents announced that they were going to walk back down leisurely. My older brother decided to run down ahead of them, and with their blessing he vanished down the trail.
“Can I do that too?” I asked my parents.
“Only if you follow your brother,” they said without looking at me, taking in the view from the mountaintop.
“God, if you get me out of this safely, I’ll serve you forever.”
So I took off down the trail, exuberant at my newfound freedom. But what I failed to realize is that my brother, who is four years older than me, was a much faster runner than me, and he also was four years smarter than me. I soon lost track of him on my way down. I started guessing on turns and switchbacks—this path seemed like one he would take, right? And after half an hour I found myself off the trail on the side of the mountain, with no sense of direction or time and with no idea how to escape the pocket of nature I found myself in. Slowly but surely, I began to panic.
It was here I dropped to my knees and prayed my first earnest, genuine prayer to God:
“God, if you get me out of this safely, I’ll serve you forever.”
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always felt drawn to the wilderness. Not because I like the outdoors—in fact, I hate being outside—but because something within me always gravitated towards the idea of being somewhere, but nowhere. And over the years, I came to realize that I’ve always found myself in some kind of wilderness.
Whether it was my severe depression in high school,
Being accepted to only one university that was literally located in the middle of a forest, far from my home and community,
Or my desperate search for meaning and purpose in my early adulthood.
But I never really knew why. Who really ever knows why, right? But as I got older and after I started attending seminary, I began to realize that I was drawn to wilderness because, as difficult as it is, wilderness is truly a gift.
One of my professors in seminary told the class once that the word used to describe “wilderness” was actually a strip of land that had desert and death on one side, and flourishing and life directly across from it on the other side. Wilderness, he said, was where God presented His people with a choice: whether or not to choose the way of death and the way things used to be, or to choose the path of life and all that it entailed. The gift of wilderness is that all of the comforts and difficulties of life are stripped away and you’re simply alone with God, left to wrestle over the very things that led you into the wilderness to begin with.
It wasn’t until recently that I realized part of the reason I had always felt so drawn to the wilderness was because it was where I first realized that God could not only hear me, but respond.
“Are you Isaac?”
A middle-aged woman wearing a hiking backpack was peering around a boulder, a few minutes after I prayed my very first prayer.
“Yes?” I said, wiping my eyes.
“Your parents have been looking for you. Follow me.” And with some confident steps, she led me back onto the path, where after some time I finally made my way down the mountain and reunited with my parents in the parking lot of the park. I ran into my parents’ embrace and sobbed, because it felt like I had been gone for ten years.
“How long was I gone?” I asked my parents in between sobs.
“Uh, about twenty minutes,” my dad said.
(Only nine years, three-hundred sixty-four days off from my initial estimate.)
Wilderness is terrifying because we often feel abandoned, alone, lost, which is why so many of us often avoid it, if possible. And yet, at the same time, the lesson that the Story of God teaches us is that wilderness is often the place where God comes face-to-face with us, because we have no other crutch to lean on. It’s in wilderness we come to the end of ourselves… and the beginning of something new. All of the great heroes of the faith are not great because of their innate talent or giftedness—no, it’s often in the kiln of the wilderness that we find heroes being birthed because they are willing to confront the very thing that holds them back from embracing their life fully with God.
And sometimes, just sometimes, wilderness is where we learn God hears when we pray.
Last month, a group of us from church made the trip down to Ensenada, Mexico, as part of an organization called Olivia’s Basket to build a home for a young family who had recently purchased a plot of land down there. Building the home doesn’t just offer security: there’s health and economic benefits that come with moving a family off the dirt floor and onto concrete, and I had wanted for years to participate in the home build. In the past, there had always been a reason not to go—family obligations, last-minute obstacles—but miraculously, this year was the year it happened.
On the second day, I spent most of my time on the roof, hammering nails. It was quiet apart from the sound of hammers hitting nails and I was silent in my work. As I hammered, I looked into the landscape of Ensenada and, without even intending to, began to pray. There were parts of my life that I hadn’t realized I had kept bottled up, grief I hadn’t felt, because it was too painful to feel it. But with each swing of the hammer, I could feel everything releasing from me.
I began grieving my son’s autism diagnosis.
I felt the sadness of my past season as a staff pastor coming to an end.
The frustrations and anxiety of job-searching and the unknown.
And somewhere in between the swings and the internal prayers, God slipped in and sat next to me on that roof. I didn’t hear him say anything until I hammered in the final set of shingles, and he said to me, “I’m here.” And then he disappeared, just as mysteriously and silently as he appeared.
It’s hard to explain what really happened in that moment. Later that day, on a call with my wife Grace, she said to me, “You sound different.” And it’s now, a month later, that I’m realizing that I’m emerging from the wild—the same person, but different.
And I know God’s still here.