Lost in the Woods: Grace That Finds Us

trail that I was on kind of went through a campsite. It was a backcountry campsite for people who are backpacking. And the trail kind of cut through the campsite following a river. And so I'm just walking along, enjoying myself, being in the woods, and I noticed that the trail is starting to get a little bit overgrown. The I've been following the river and kind of the rocks that have been thrown there by the river, are getting bigger. They're getting less worn down. There's more moss growing on the face of the stones. And I think, well, this trail is not particularly well maintained, maintained, and I keep going. I keep walking. [00:29:39] (47 seconds)  #BackcountryHike

And the branches close in. They get get tighter and tighter. And then eventually, I'm like, you know what? I don't think I'm on the trail anymore. So I sit down on this big rock, and I pull out my map. And wouldn't you know it? At the end of the campsite, the trail had turned, but all the people in the camp site getting down to the river had kind of trampled a path. So if you weren't really paying attention, if you didn't notice the the signs to turn, it was really easy just to keep walking on the path that the people from the campsite had worn down over time, which is exactly what I had done. I [00:30:25] (46 seconds)  #OffTrailRealization

So the trail, as I'm looking at the map, is directly above me. I don't know quite know how far, but the trail is just somewhere up there. And I'm thinking to myself, well, I can go back and go find that trail, or I can save myself a little bit of time and just climb this very steep mountainside that has no trail, that no one's ever walked up, where the the leaves and the detritus from the trees have created this nice kind of squishy path that I would, like, have to [00:31:47] (34 seconds)  #ChooseYourPath

grab onto trees and rocks and, like, pull myself up the side of this mountain. And I think to myself, well, self, that seems easier than going back to the marked trail that everyone has walked on. So I began climbing up the side of this mountain. And I'm like 15 feet away from where I was sitting on my rock, and it occurs to me that this was a very bad idea. Because slipping, I'm sliding, the the ground is not compact at all. [00:32:21] (38 seconds)  #BushwhackFail

I'm like grabbing onto trees, onto saplings to pull myself up. And again, I have that moment of maybe I should go back down and go back. But I think to myself, no, No. No. The trail's just up there somewhere. I can make it. Carrie was not on this trip. And I, like, get to the point where I'm just like, at this point, I've gone too far. I can't possibly go back. [00:32:59] (30 seconds)  #TooFarToReturn

And it got pretty precarious. There are a couple places where the slope of the mountain turned into a a face that I kinda had to figure out how to get up and around. But eventually, I kind of, without even realizing it, kind of just like come up one of those faces and fall onto the trail. And I lay there for a moment and I go, well, that was not my smartest idea. But there I am, finally back on the trail. [00:33:29] (34 seconds)  #BackOnTrail

A lot of ink has been spilt by theologians and philosophers trying to understand sin, particularly what Paul is talking about in this passage, trying to understand the concept of original sin and how did sin enter into the world. And we talk about Adam, you know, Adam is the one who who brings it all in, and Eve in the Garden of Eden, eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that introduces sin into the world. And we like to, you know, put it on, like, well, if Adam and Eve just hadn't eaten from the the [00:34:04] (36 seconds)  #OriginsOfSin

tree the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, everybody would be okay. But I don't wanna, like, I don't wanna give Adam and Eve a pass, but I also don't wanna, like, say that we wouldn't have eaten from that tree too. If we had been there in the Garden Of Eden, if Adam and Eve hadn't eaten from that tree, at some point, someone would have said, this sounds pretty good. And so the sin of Adam and the sin of Eve is our sin. It's a sin that we share. [00:34:39] (37 seconds)  #SinIsShared