Raft Guidin’, Tree Huggin’, and Bible Thumpin!

Weird things happen around us all the time. It’s what makes life fun. Without things that shock, amaze, or awe us; without occurrences that are powerful, meaningful, or wisdom bringing; and without other living creatures, what would life be? Most of our legacies would be that we worked hard to pay for things we did not need to pass on to our children who would also spend their lives just trying to stay so full of emotional experiences that they could keep their minds off of the utter futility of their existence. Fortunately we know that that’s not the way things are at all!

A few years ago I couldn’t stay out of a state of depression. Life had just not turned out the way I expected it to. I was still a pretty funny, happy-go-lucky guy with some good friends, but everything just seemed forced. If I couldn’t keep everyone at a party totally in love with me, my reaction was to immediately lose all my social graces and feel inferior to everyone. Life was confusing back then. I got to where all I could ever pay attention to was what was going on inside myself. I was convinced that I didn’t care what people thought of me, but yet that’s all that really mattered in my world. I was a slave, and I was frequently depressed.

During that time, the thought started to occur to me that considering the majesty of life itself, why was it so hard to find where I fit. They call it nature because it’s natural after all. Was it really my destiny to rot away in my apartment just trying to sustain myself and figuring out how to buy a big screen TV, (when I wasn’t preoccupied with trying to make fair-weather friends)? About that time, things started slowly but surely happening to me. I started learning how to “follow the wind.”

Thank God there was actually something to follow or I would have just ended up at some other intangible place. The conclusion I’ve come up with after a few years of generally enjoying life and living in awe of it is that the random events that happen to a person who is seeking answers are too purposeful to merely happen by chance. No, they happen because there is a God who not only knows you, but also cares about you. He cares about you because you are his creation and he knows you the way you knew your own childhood fantasies or the way you know the projects you design in your mind as an adult. He wants you to know him because he and his purposes are the only way for a human to live life in its fullness. All other roads eventually lead to pain, destruction, and futility. God does not want that for anyone and he is willing to go very far to show you this fact. Here is my story of what god did for me to show me that he was real and wanted me in his family:

A few years ago, I was sitting at home thinking. I had a lot of time to do that back then since I was on house arrest for a DUI. I knew that I needed to get out of debt and I started to come up with a plan to do it. A few months passed and the plan started getting fine tuned, but the problem was I had lost my good paying job as a bartender and I was now working at Lowe’s making barely enough to pay the minimum on my bills. I started to realize that it would take me years to fill the mighty chasm of debt I had accumulated.

Nowadays, I would pray about that sort of thing, but back then I just thought about it. Within a few days of recognizing my plight, some people showed up that had a job that looked pretty good. I got hired, made outstanding money for a while, got laid off, and saw my last paycheck pay off my last bill (really). At the time I was pretty sure that I had seen God’s hand in that, but conveniently ignored it, as usual.

A little later I embarked on a lifestyle that I really was made for. I was a whitewater raft guide! Nothing mattered to me but that. Now I was living the life that I was meant for. I slept in a hammock outside most nights, was doing what I was made for, had pretty much forgotten what shoes and a shirt were for, and was having a great time. The only problem, besides maybe some habitual drunkenness, was that it all depended on a job.

So of course, I ended up getting fired. To this day, I don’t know what I did to invoke it, but they didn’t want me anymore; so my job ended and my whole little world with it. Life was over; that was all there was to it. I even had a moment when I almost jumped off of a very high cliff. Of course, I realized how silly that would have been to do over a job; so I decided to take the little bit of money I had and to do something I had always wanted to do. I decided to hike the Appalacian Trail.

Describing every detail of what ended up being a 350 mile hike would take up more pages than I care to write; but I will tell you this: The wilderness is absolutely permeated with God. I’m not talking about a bunch of people asking you if you died today are you sure you’d go to heaven. That would make the woods a horrible place! No, what I’m referring to is evidence of his existence.

In modern urban life, we have sheltered ourselves to the point where you really don’t need God, except maybe in a philosophical or psychological way. Out there, though, you don’t take things for granted. A little thing can make your day in a way that you probably just don’t realize in a city. In a city it’s relatively easy to find essential things like water. Out there, though, you depend on having to find a flowing stream so you don’t end up becoming dehydrated and dying. Also it has to rain occasionally for the streams to have water in them, which means of course that you have to spend days walking in the rain. Oh well, you take the good with the bad. I sometimes quite enjoyed walking in the rain; though I’m glad I never suffered from hypothermia.

Maybe I’m not doing a great job as a travel agent for the AT, but my point is this: Living without modern “luxuries” opened the door to really seeing God in action. There were at least two different situations in which I witnessed events that were so improbable that you could probably get away with calling them miracles. Also having the majesty of God’s creation surrounding you 24-7 has an effect on you that’s hard to explain if you haven’t been there. One thing that I was sure of, though, was that everything good in the world had come from God and I wanted to be close to him and not far away.

All in all, it was an awesome time. I started out alone and afraid, but left with some of the greatest experiences and friends of my life! During the trip God even gave me an opportunity to face my demons by taking a group of Boy Scouts down the Nantahala river in a raft and teaching them how to navigate whitewater. In return, at their peril, they fed me. Little did they know – I still go to their house to this day. It only goes to show you, don’t feed the hikers! But, by the time I left, I was absolutely convinced in the existence of God, though I wasn’t yet sure whether he went by Allah, Vishnu, Jehova, Odin, or Morgan Freeman. But, that would all be made clear very soon. Incidentally, my first job upon returning to Atlanta was guiding rafts right here in town on the Chattahoochee river. I would not have found that job had I not gotten lost one day and run into a couple of guys standing in their driveway. God truly is nifty!

When it was time for me to leave, I was about to take my very first Greyhound ride when God provided a way home for me. It wasn’t exactly a miraculous thing, but it did serve his purposes. I rode home with a guy named Eric who happened to be an assistant pastor at a Christian church in Tennessee.

At that point in time I no longer denied God, but I didn’t know him. Eric and I talked for the whole 400 mile trip (which to me felt like warp speed). He was an outstanding witness! Without cramming anything down my throat, he did manage to present to me some knowledge about Jesus that I had never heard before and that made a lot of sense.

He asked me who I thought Jesus was. “I don’t know, but apparently he can calm your nerves,” I said.

“That’s true,” he replied, “but why do you say that?”

“Well, he’s the one I call out to every time someone’s getting on mine!”

“Well, I’m glad you’re calling on him for something, but who do you think he really was?”

“I don’t know, but I do know that he really walked the earth.”

“That’s right, but do you also know that he claimed to be God?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”

“Do you believe that he was?”

“I don’t know, a lot of people have different ideas on who God is.”

“Yes, but Jesus is the only credible person ever to walk the earth who claimed to be God.”

“Okay, so you believe him – great!” I said. I bet you would also believe me if I were to tell you that I was an illegitimate child of Bill Clinton, I thought to myself.

“Have you ever wondered why so many people believe in him?” he asked. And suddenly it dawned on me that I had never really thought about the issue. Somewhere in my day-to-day failing struggle of self-fulfillment I just never even thought about obscure issues like Jesus Christ. Come to think of it, I never really thought about a lot of issues back then (except what I was doing for fun that night). The Bible doesn’t lie when it tells you about becoming a whole new creature in Christ!

I bit. “Okay, who was he?”

“Well, he was either who he said he was, or he was lying and just trying to get a following, or he was crazy.”

“Go on.”

“If you were to read any historical account of Jesus’ life and teaching, you’ll realize very quickly that he wasn’t lying.”

“How so?”

“Well, the one thing that Jesus definitely was not was stupid. There were countless times when he outwitted his challengers – educated men.”

“Okay”

“At some point he had to have known that he was headed for execution; probably when he walked into a town and had rocks hurled at him. There’s never been any account of Jesus living any kind of lavish life. Don’t you think any intelligent person would have quit and faded into the background before it came to the point of his torture and execution?”

“Wow! That is convincing,” I replied, “so why wasn’t he just nuts?”

“Have you ever heard of his miracles?”

“Of course.”

“They validate him. You know, he even predicted his own resurrection. Also Jesus also fulfilled every one of the Old Testament prophecies that were written about the coming Messiah. I’m not sure what the actual number is, but the odds of those prophecies being fulfilled in one man are something like one in a trillion.” (If the data in the Left Behind series is accurate, the real number is one in one quadrillion, one hundred and twenty-five trillion.) Clearly, God didn’t leave much room for error!

“But doesn’t that depend on the Bible being a credible historical document,” I asked, using up my rapidly depleting store of intellectualism.

“It is,” he said, “There’s been a lot of books written about the authenticity of the Bible and of Christ’s claims. You should read one when you get the chance. After all, you can’t argue against something if you don’t know what the argument is. For that matter, you should read the Bible too. Have you ever noticed that whenever people argue about religion, they never seem to use what’s actually written in the Bible as their basis?” And with that climax of logic, he handed me a copy of The Message (which is the Bible paraphrased in real English – not the Shakespearean type).

I was amazed! I had never heard anyone talk about Jesus like that. Until that day, Christians were just boring, diluted people saying hallelujah and raising their hands in the air while they sang sappy songs. Now I was talking to an intelligent, fully informed follower of Christ who seemed genuinely happy and had an awesome family (which is something I only hope to have).

Now here’s the weird thing. He told me that I should read a book that researched Christ’s authenticity. Two days before, a friend of mine from the Appalacian Trail had given me a copy of The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. I can’t imagine what I had done to see God’s hand so clearly in my life, but I could ignore it no longer. There’s a point where you just can’t write things off as coincidence anymore.

I didn’t make my decision that day because, convinced as I was becoming, I wanted my decision to mean something. I didn’t want to simply give in to a sales pitch no matter how good the pitch was. But neither did I want to procrastinate indefinitely about it, so I started reading The Message daily. Jesus astounded me! His teachings were of freedom, not bondage! They just made sense. It was a message of living life the way you always intuitively knew that it was meant to be lived, not the wheel spinning way most of us live.

One summer night I was sitting by a swimming pool alone reading the gospel of Luke and I just kniw it was true. I knew it with all of my being, the way I imagine a mother sometimes knows when her son needs help. Mostly I knew that through grace, I could have a real life. No longer did I have to retreat to the woods for months at a time to really experience life! Through Christ Jesus, God’s great gift to his children, the source of all that is good was available to me wherever I was. I would even get the remarkable giftof his Holy Spirit to live within me and guide me through life (the meadows and the swamps). I was sitting there by the pool reflecting on all this, and I knew I wanted it. I knew that never again would my pursuits be in vain and I would never again be abandoned. I hopped in the pool, said the prayer, thanked God for his goodness, and was baptized.

The next morning I woke up and knew that the change was real. It wasn’t something I could feel exactly, but I knew that I had received Christ and a new wonderful life was beginning. Since that day I’ve had some good times and some bad times. I’ve had times of basking in the glorious glow of the Lord, and moments of doubt that have ended in my seeing God even more clearly. I’ve had love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and guidance in my life since that day, but I have not had regrets!

God bless you all through the majestic Christ, Jesus!

- Kelly Keener