by Steve Van Winkle
I ‘ve been watching the news more lately. You probably have too. If we compare notes, we’d probably have the same impressions. There’s less work, more uncertainty, and a general feeling of foreboding about 2009. Watching all the handwringing over the economy, it seems this New Year is beginning with something no other has in recent memory: two strikes.
I have heard and seen a lot of people take some stock of what’s going on. Many people have learned lessons and many more are searching for some. It’s not always easy to maintain perspective when the economy seems to be collapsing, especially considering that for nearly 15 years or so the culture has blared at us that the bottom line is the standard by which we should be reviewing our lives.
I think, however, that Christians should bear in mind a baseline the world never factors.
That dawned on me last Thanksgiving. My wife, Cheryl, and I were with a church member whose family owns one of the oldest ranches in Montana. He invited us up to hunt elk; my usual luck prevailed as we only saw a great big herd of nothing.
But we were roaming up on a high plateau that overlooked the entire valley and brought us eye level with some of the purple mountains’ majesty hundreds of miles away. Bouncing over ruts (I would be lying if I called them roads), we traveled an old stagecoach trail, complete with a genuine, leftover, weathered-gray signpost along the route, through a high meadow. Along the way, we drifted through old homesteads littering the choice ground now dusted with snow under an obscenely blue sky, while the wind was pushing over the sage and the tops of the pines.
Something occurred to me up there. I could see more mountain peaks above me. They were close by, and the valley was “out there,” far beneath my elevated view. I was high up, and yet, I was in a kind of valley.
I thought if I didn’t know better, if I hadn’t kept track of how far up I had traveled, I would look at this plateau and think it was a valley. I was looking around and realized how my perspective on life had been altered.
I have whined and complained this past year. I have felt the depths and the despondency. I have learned to distrust myself, and I re-learned lessons good men had taught me years before. But the journey to and the view from that high plateau on the Climbing Arrow Ranch helped me. It helped me regain perspective.
Here I am in a place where only a privileged few get to go without paying thousands of dollars, and I live in a place where only a privileged few in my vocation get to call home, and I have a church that God has pulled out of the grave with people I am privileged to know, and I have a family whom I have a hard time writing about simply because I do not have the vocabulary to describe my love and my satisfaction and my awe and my gratitude for them, and I have now known the Lord for 25 years, and I have navigated 15 years of ministry in one church without having to sell used cars, and I have written a thing or two, and I have made friends of indescribably interesting people and discovered brothers-in-arms in the ministry, and have met men along the way I cherish more than my own father, and have been given incredible and undeservedly kind words from my peers, and have been given opportunities for interesting ministry outlets by college presidents, popular authors, and an editor whom I admire greatly, and I can look out my window and watch a sky bleed to the ground over the peaks of the Bridgers, and I can read of Billy Neumann’s fabulous Sunday in a tiny town and of Ron Sear’s Thanksgiving Meal to hurting people, and I can remember the missionary families celebrating this holiday a world away from loved ones, and I can stop on my way home from the madness and catch brown trout with HD colors as mottled leaves fall like rain around me from a fall breeze, and I can hear my daughter sing and feel the wetness of a tear, and I can think of the sunrises I will see out hunting the next several days, bursting over the Spanish Peaks and warm a chilled deer stand, and I can make less money than I did a year ago and get a raise in blessings, and I can walk into the church I walked into originally 23 years ago and know that it is still here, and I can see that God has the final say in everything even if I think I know the reason or the future, and I can read Noel Smith and feel a kinship I can’t explain, and I can feel gut-punched at friends’ health struggles, and I can get dozens of cards on Pastor Appreciation Day, and I can watch Nebraska football with my son and smile as I pass on a sweet addiction to him, and I can read the scripture and wonder at how it speaks still and teaches me still, and I can stand to preach at one of the worst times in our nation’s economic history and sense that I have something to say from God, and I can think of the distances I have been able to travel preaching that Word, and I see the people in our church who God has called to the mission field and to church work, and I can read the sticky notes my daughter leaves on my desk telling me how much she loves me, and…
…And I remind myself that the valleys I trudge through are indeed long and far below the peak. But maybe, just maybe, the valley is actually a plateau high above all the sorrow and misery and pain and lostness and loneliness and addiction and depression that could have marked my life if God hadn’t lifted me high above the real valley’s floor. Perhaps I forget that slugging through a plateau just beneath the peak is infinitely better than being condemned to the valley far below. I think I too often take for granted how high God has taken my life, how far up he has planted my feet; consequently, I am prone to look at the plateaus as though they were valleys. It doesn’t mean the plateaus aren’t hard or painful. They are. I have never experienced such madness and uncertainty and anger and apathy as I have this past year. It’s just that, every now and then, I need to remind myself that, because of Christ, I will never see the actual valley floor again.
While the world measures its worth by the bottom line, this is the baseline of the Christian life. It doesn’t mean that the economy won’t crash or that trials can be avoided or that people won’t lose their jobs. It means that, for Christians, these things happen far above the valley floor, where heaven is a real hope, and brothers and sisters in Christ are genuine comfort, and biblical hope buoys all because Christ loved us and died for us.
No one knows what a day may bring forth, let alone a year. But, while the bottom line can be fickle as economies adjust and times change, the baseline of our life in Christ keeps our perspective stable and our hope constant, no matter what circumstances and situations 2009 will bring upon us all.