Sharing a limitless treasure

My wife, Victoria, and I hiked the Appalachian Trail in a single six-month hike in 1988. During that hike, we spent most of our nights in a tent. However, we did spend roughly 70 nights in trail shelters.

Along the Appalachian Trail, there is a series of shelters available. Volunteers built the typically three-sided wood buildings designed for overnight use at intervals of about ten miles apart from Georgia to Maine. The shelters are convenient, as you don’t have to put up and take down a tent and they are also close to a reliable water source. The trail shelters are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Though some are more accommodating, most of the shelters will comfortably hold eight hikers. However, trail etiquette says that there is always room for one more, particularly when the weather is bad. Following this trail etiquette did prove humorous at times. Victoria and I shared an unusually large trail shelter with an entire Boy Scout Troop during an April snowstorm in Tennessee. Fortunately, the shelter had been a barn before the park service bought the land for the trail. There was plenty of room for everyone.

On other occasions, we packed in to traditional eight-person shelters with more than the suggested limit. In Vermont, we were warm and dry in a shelter for eight when a group of a dozen soggy hikers arrived in the rain looking for a dry spot to camp. Ten joined us in the shelter, while the other two pitched a tent out front. Poor Victoria ended up pushing a rather large hiker off her all night as he kept rolling over in his sleeping bag.

I tell this story to let you picture how an overcrowded trail could be a problem for hikers. It is not just that you have to run into fellow hikers all day on the trail. You also compete with each other for shelter space and suitable campsites in the evening. With that in mind, it is easy to understand why not everyone loves guidebook authors.

A guidebook author is the sort of person who will tell everyone willing to buy his or her book the location of your favorite campsite. This is a bit of a confession, of course, as Victoria and I have written eight books together in addition to the three books she has written on her own. Several of our books are guidebooks, including The Best of the Appalachian Trail guides. In those two books, we told people about great day and overnight hike destinations all along the trail, including Little Rock Pond in Vermont, where we were packed in to a shelter with 10 other wet hikers.

Not only do we tell people where to hike, but also we suggest in several books how you might find solitude by hiking in off peak times. It is surely not due to us alone that use of the Appalachian Trail has increased during those previously off-peak times, but nonetheless, the trail can be overcrowded at times. While some hikers are glad to have found the trail through books like ours, not everyone on the A.T. has a fondness for guidebook authors. We take something known by a select few and share it with everybody willing to read what we write. What some hikers wish could be their secret, we proclaim to anyone who’ll buy or borrow a book.

You must be wondering by now what any of this has to do with the Gospel. Yes, I do have a point hiding somewhere in my confession of a guidebook author.

Before Jesus returned to heaven, he told his disciples to wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit. Once they are empowered by God, they are to become witnesses to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

If those first followers of Jesus do nothing, then the Jesus Movement ends with them. If the Apostles fail to tell others, then Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection will have accomplished nothing.

The Apostles did a good job with Jesus’ Great Commission. Ancient traditions and other evidence suggest that within their lifetime, Jesus’ disciples had reached as far as what is now England to the west and India to the east.

Had those first disciples hoarded their knowledge of Jesus, then there would have been no Christianity. Instead of treating their relationship with God as a personal matter, the Apostles began to act more like overzealous guidebook authors pointing the way to something that could have been a secret for them alone.

The Apostles knew that the Kingdom of God was not a place of limited resources. Instead of being like an Appalachian Trail shelter on a rainy night, which really does have a load limit. The Apostles knew that in the Kingdom of God there really is always room for one more. Always.

We can hoard our relationship with God as a private treasure. We can keep silent, not wanting to intrude on someone else’s private beliefs. Or, we can, use the occasional openings the Holy Spirit offers us to share the Easter Joy that is ours in Christ knowing heaven always has a vacancy sign out front. It’s up to us now. If this generation of Christians does not spread the Good News to the next, then Christianity will die out within a generation.

God’s whole great project to love all creation could fall flat with our generation. But God has confidence in you. God gives you the gift of the Holy Spirit to empower you to speak up when you feel you can’t. God will gives you the words to use when you have no words. You are God’s plan for spreading the Gospel. There is no back up plan.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)

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