Photo by Paul Venturo
“You’ve gotta go to the Wichita Wildlife Refuge,” our uncle told us. “The mountains there are huge.”
So we decided to try. But we knew the Wichita Mountains couldn’t really be that big. After all, they were in Oklahoma, and we had been to the Colorado Rockies—surely no mountain in Oklahoma could compare with those.
When we arrived at our campground in the refuge, it was just as we thought. The mountains were nothing like the Colorado peaks we’d climbed. They were gentle slopes covered in rocks and brush. But it was definitely a cool place, just as our uncle had said. There was plenty of wilderness to explore, and we were convinced that this was a nice, easy place to practice for our Colorado hikes, offering just enough excitement to be worth it, but nothing like the perilous peaks we were used to.
At first, our assumption proved to be correct. We wandered over the sunny, rocky slopes and grassy meadows covered with all kinds of red, yellow, and purple wildflowers, watching for tiny frogs in little pools and streams and for colorful collared lizards basking on the rocks.
But by and by, we realized that we couldn’t have been more wrong.
Saturday, March 30, the day before Easter—we were exploring all over Eagle Mountain. All afternoon, we hopped and climbed over big boulders in the sunshine, high above our campground, breathing in the smoke from the controlled burn that just happened to be in effect that day. We laughed and yelled as we leaped and scrambled, and finally, happy and hungry, we settled down in a grassy place to cook our powdered soup for dinner.
An hour or so later, our tummies were full, our tongues were burned, and we were ready to scramble around some more as we began to make our way down to where the trail wound near the foot of the mountain. (We weren’t on any official trail; we were just exploring.)
This descent was where things started to go awry. We were taking a different route down than we had come up, and we had never been here before. We knew the general direction of where we needed to go; the trouble came with figuring out how to navigate around the large, steep rocks towering all around us. One rock at a time, we clambered through a giant obstacle course—but the farther we went, the trickier the moves became. One rock led to another until all of a sudden, before we even realized it, we found ourselves on a treacherous traverse, just as the light was fading from the sky, with massive rock faces all around us giving way to deep, dark cracks and drop-offs below.
I found myself perched on a skinny ridge, staring down into a gaping crevasse, knowing that the only way onto the safe, solid rock ahead was a complicated move, in which I would be hanging precariously over the crack before I made a “leap of faith,” as my brothers would call it, to get to safety.
Fear is a paralyzing thing. It grips the chest, immobilizes the body, leaks into every muscle with unrelenting authority; it leaves you in a state of utter helplessness. There I was, balanced on the ledge, locked in fear’s control, arms weak and shivering, breathing deeply to keep from completely panicking. Keeping my sanity when perched in precarious positions high up on perilous rock faces has never been my strongest point.
Fear is often a great enemy when God tells us to do something. It is easy to give way to fear when you are about to hand someone a Gospel tract. A good thing to remember when you are paralyzed in fear is that there is no fear in love. 1 Jn. 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.” Ask God to fill you with so much of His love that it drives out all fear. And before long you will realize, like I realized on the rock, that there comes a time when you just have to take the leap.
I leapt. I was suddenly calmer and more resigned as I thought to myself, “Well, here goes it.” Because, you see, I had to do it. I felt strong arms around me and then all at once the good solid rock beneath my feet.
That was not the end of the danger that day. By the time we reached the trail, it was quite dark, we had escaped through several sketchy places, and we had even seen a rattlesnake. I, at least, was grateful to be alive. But we had made it, and we had had plenty of fun to match the terror.
No, the Wichita Mountains are not nearly so huge, in our opinion, as the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. But they certainly hold their fair share of peril!
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Used by permission. All rights reserved.