Not Worth Following

My wife Hannah and I are differentiated by a few guiding paradigms, which I call our Great Divides. They are unshared goals or values that often, if not always, come into conflict with one another. So far we have discovered two pairs of dueling desires (I suspect there are more to come), but the Divide featured in this story is Adventure vs. Comfort. 

My desire for and attraction to adventure interrupts Hannah’s pursuit of comfort daily but never is it more prominent than when we are deciding what to do in our free time. So, naturally, they are almost always jockeying for position when we are on vacation, and our recent road trip to Oregon was no exception. We were staying with good friends of ours in Roseburg. As they were planning to leave for their own vacation on a Thursday morning, Hannah and I decided to camp in the nearby Umpqua National Forest for the remaining two nights of our excursion. 

Our Thursday night campsite was located on Highway 138, the main drag through the forest, but there was a scenic waterfall hike about 40 miles North of the site that I wanted to take at some point during the day. Imagine a giant square measuring 40 miles on each side. Roseburg is the bottom left corner, our campsite is the bottom right, a town called Cottage Grove is the top left, and our hike is the top right. The bottom line is Highway 138, the left edge is Interstate 5, the top line is a curvy but well-established mountain road, and the right edge is totally unknown. My thought was that we could drive to the hike, enjoy the views, and find our way south through the forested mountains to our campsite. That was my thought, anyway.

We got to the hike at about 3:30, having lost cellphone reception about 10 miles outside of Cottage Grove. Hannah, nervous about the lack of reception and the threat of being attacked by a mountain lion, was convinced that we should abandon the hike and head straight to our more comfortable campsite. I was bound and determined to enjoy the 3.5-mile scenic loop. As we were packing our bag for the trip a family (including several girls under the age of 15) came off the trail and started loading their car. As we got to talking, they had just finished the hike we were embarking on and found it to be quite manageable. This was somewhat reassuring to Hannah, so we set out. 

About 20 minutes in, the trail began to change. What had been two feet wide and well-worn was now 18, 12, or 6 inches wide and overgrown with foliage and several patches of poison oak. Hannah’s blood pressure was rising by the step, and I began to think, “those girls really did this for 4 miles?” The quality of the trail and Hannah’s motivation to continue both dissolved quickly, until we reached a point where I could no longer tell where the trail was. Disheartened by my failure to be a competent guide, I decided it was time to turn around and head back. After walking back about a tenth of a mile, I realized my mistake. We had missed a switchback and taken a branch-off trail that was indeed a dead end. My heart soared and Hannah's sank. We could carry on our adventure. 

The rest of the trip up to the falls was uneventful, and the horseshoe-shaped cliff that framed it was gorgeous. We both were glad we made it, but Hannah was eager to get back to the safety of our vehicle, so we pressed on and started heading down the other side of the valley. I knew that the creek containing the falls (Trestle Creek) would feed into Brice Creek, at which point we were supposed to take a left at a fork in the trail and return to our trailhead. As you may have already guessed, I missed the fork. After walking parallel with Brice Creek for at least a half-mile, I knew we were going the wrong way. Hannah, tired in body and weary of fearing the looming cougar attack, was crushed by the news. We turned around hiked the remaining mile and a half to our car. We were sweaty, dirty, and I was pretty sure I had walked through some of that nasty poison oak, so we embarked on the journey to our campsite. 

But I had a confession to make. I hadn’t mapped the route to our site ahead of time. If we tried to head south (taking the unknown right edge of the square), it would be total guesswork. If we decided to head back to cellphone reception at Cottage Grove, we may not arrive at our campsite till after 10pm, as it was already 7. Had I known how the night would go, setting up the tent at 10 would have sounded idyllic, but I was pretty sure I could guess my way to the campsite, so we headed on a southward adventure.

I was wrong. In the Midwest, roads go one direction. In the mountains, they don’t. After snaking our way through one-lane roads traveling 25 miles an hour for 30 minutes, I admitted defeat and we turned around to take the long, winding trip back to Cottage Grove where we would stop, get Dairy Queen, and decide our next move. We got Hannah a cheeseburger and fries, but I was too disgusted with myself to eat. Ever since the second missed turn on the hike, one thought had been touring my mind, “I am not worth following.” For the first time in our short marriage, I felt totally incapable of getting myself and my wife where we needed to go. I didn’t want to make the next decision. I didn’t want to drive. I just wanted it to be someone else’s responsibility. But there was nobody else, so we pressed on.

We had 2 options. 

1. Head to Roseburg, forget our campsite reservation and stay at our friends' house. They had given us the code to the electronic deadbolt in the front door which we had locked up that morning. There we could sleep in a bed, shower off the sweat, blood, poison oak, and disappointment from the day. The downside was that we would have to make the 90-minute drive into the Forest in the morning.

2. Head to Roseburg, gas up, and make the haul to our campsite, hopefully arriving around 11. No shower, no bed, but we awake in the Forest.

We decided on Option 1. However, I realized that I forgot to get gas when we were about 5 miles out of Roseburg, so I turned around and took it as a sign from God to stay in town for the night. But there was one problem: my sweet, thorough, and careful wife had taken the extra precaution of locking the knob lock along with the deadbolt that morning. We had the combination, but not the doorknob key. Option 2 was a no-go, but I still had the sign from the Lord to stay, so we decided to get a hotel room. 

We stopped at the nearest hotel: no vacancy. We moved on to the next: no vacancy. Hotel after hotel after hotel, cheap and expensive and local and franchise: no vacancy. Those thoughts I had been having since 4 in the afternoon took over, and it was truly enough to make a grown man cry. I had admitted defeat by heading back to Cottage Grove, admitted defeat in heading back to Roseburg, and admitted defeat in deciding to spend the money on a hotel, but this final no-vacancy defeat did not have to be admitted because it could not be denied. We were tired and beaten down with nowhere to sleep. Failed day of vacation, failed husband, failed man. 

The only thing to do was to hit the road and find our campsite in the middle of the night. We got there at about 12:30am, set up camp in record time, and slept. I felt like a combination of Joseph in the Bethlehem stall and Elijah under the broom tree. I had done my best to take care of my family, but I wasn't all that concerned about what waking up would look like. That being said, we woke up happy. We cooked breakfast over an open fire and enjoyed a beautiful morning. The troubles of yesterday belonged to yesterday, even enhancing the joys of the new morning, and isn't that about right. 

Reflecting on this story, I am filled with gratitude, worship, and faith. I'm grateful for a Savior and spiritual husband who is so wise and powerful that he has never lead me astray. Not even once. I worship my God for his supreme kindness. This cancerous infection called pride seeks to take my life, but the Lord God is so good that he has consistently humbled me but has never harmed me. Not even once. That is glorious.  I am filled with faith because in this story I see a continuation and confirmation of Jesus' perfect track record of redemption. The badness of the day was bad, but it gave birth to an incredible new-morning-mercy kind of good. The storm was silenced, leaving behind a stillness both serene and divine. 

I'm tempted to believe that I am worth following, but this story reminds me that such worthiness belongs ever and only to Jesus.