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THE SCIENCE OF GRACE #20
A BEACON IN THE BLIZZARD
If there’s any single place on Planet Earth where you are just totally abandoned – according to Everest writer and summiteer Jon Krakauer – that place would have to be Camp Four on the world’s tallest mountain. He describes the infamous “South Col” as:
“. . . A forlorn plateau of bulletproof ice and windswept boulders 26,000 feet above sea level. . . . Roughly rectangular in shape, about four football fields long by two across, the Col’s eastern margin drops 7,000 feet down the Kangshung Face into Tibet; the other side plunges 4,000 feet to the Western Cwm (küm). Just back from the lip of this chasm, at the Col’s westernmost edge, the tents of Camp Four squatted on a patch of barren ground surrounded by more than a thousand discarded oxygen canisters. If there is a more desolate, inhospitable habitation anywhere on the planet, I hope never to find it.”
You could maybe argue, a bit ironically, that a climber is probably closer to God way up there at the top of Everest than anywhere else. If you wanted to say a prayer, there almost wouldn’t be any long distance charges from the peak of “Chomolungma.” Heaven’s switchboard would be almost within reach. But as Krakauer describes the night of May 9, 1996, just hours before the Adventure Consultants climbing team headed for the top, there was a screaming, desolate wind whipping through the camp. It was many, many degrees below zero, and of course, with the wind-chill factor, the cold was unbelievable. The tents were flapping fiercely in the icy gale, and mountaineers, unable to eat or sleep or communicate, huddled abjectly in the forlorn little community. It was as isolated a feeling, he writes later, as he had ever encountered. You felt disconnected from the rest of the human race, and – not to put words in his mouth – maybe from God too.
Many of you know the tragic Into Thin Air story and how eight people died the next afternoon in a killer storm. But as we continue to study together the Bible doctrine of grace and its availability to help us through OUR storms, I want for us to focus just here on a Dr. Seaborn “Beck” Weathers. Late that same evening, Beck, a pathologist from Dallas, got lost right there on the South Col, not very far from the tents. But in the whiteout there at the roof of the world, 350 yards may as well have been 350,000 miles. Other desperate climbers finally managed to straggle to the tents, but Beck and Yasuko Namba were essentially left for dead. In fact, the following morning, when the winds abated, some mountaineers went out to where the two bodies were, and found to their amazement that he was still living – barely. But, their hearts and spirits sinking, the rest of the team determined that he was just too far gone to save. Better to hold in reserve their scant resources and bodily strength to save those who actually had a chance of survival.
What happened next has been told a number of times. But after hours of lying there at 26,000 feet, cold, frozen, abandoned, his mind and body in a zombie-like trance, Beck Weathers suddenly woke up. Something or Someone jarred him into consciousness. And he realized, in his own words, that “the cavalry wasn’t coming” for him.
There are some extra bits of this story that have come to light since the publishing of Into Thin Air. Beck Weathers had been struggling with clinical depression; in fact, his climbing was a kind of self-therapy for him. His marriage to “Peach,” an anxious wife at home in Texas, was suffering; one web site described his personal relationships as being “in disarray.” By his own confession, he had also “drifted away from spirituality.”
And even at this moment of critical decision, literally moments away from death – if he closed his eyes in sleep for even one more minute, it was over – Beck Weathers didn’t really know how to pray to God. How to plead for grace. First of all, he had “wandered far away from home,” as the old song goes. Secondly, I have no doubt his brain cells were just too frozen up, too locked in a cryogenic stupor, to say something as simple as the Lord’s Prayer. But he wrote, years later:
“If prayer isn’t just words, but instead that thing you believe with all your heart at the core of your being, then I surely did pray. On Everest, more than any other time in my life, I had a sense of what was important to me, what I truly cherished.”
And the Lord heard that wordless, inaudible, imperceptible, unformed cry of the heart. The power of heaven got Beck Weathers back to his feet; somehow, God guided him impulsively in the right direction back to the tents, which were still completely invisible in the driving storm. Today Dr. Weathers is safely home in Texas again, minus a couple of hands, but with a renewed faith in the God whose grace is present in the world’s fiercest storms.
There’s a wonderful passage of Scripture from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah which, while it doesn’t mention Mount Everest, certainly talks about the dark, lonely places. Here it is, from chapter 43:
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.”
There’s a bit of high Himalayan flavor to King David’s cry in Psalm 139:
“Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I go up to the heavens, You are there. If I make my bed in the depths, You are there.”
And what this promises us, friend, is the eternal presence of God in our world, no matter how physically or emotionally remote. If you’re in a time of deep spiritual storm, with hard winds of temptation, or gales of grief, you can know that God’s grace is right there. You can call out to heaven right after messing up, or even WHILE you’re messing up.
Speaking of storms, there’s a pair of New Testament anecdotes that wonderfully illustrate this very point about grace. You can read in Matthew 14 where the disciple Peter, and the other 11, were caught out at sea in a real tempest. It’s the famous Peter-walking-on-water saga, which you may remember has a rather wet ending for the showboating fisherman. But does Jesus yell at him? Does he leave him to drown? No, grace is there just five seconds after the failure of faith.
Now skip down to the Thursday night before Jesus dies. You remember how this same Peter, who’s barely toweled off and blow-dried his hair, has now denied Jesus three times in a row. “Jesus of where?” he asks, shaking his head. “That name doesn’t ring a bell. Yes, I had a preacher pull me out of the drink once, but I think his name was Fred.” And it says in Luke, chapter 22, that even as Peter’s saying the words of denial, even as his disavowal is on his lips, he looks up and his eyes lock with those of the Savior. Right smack dab in the middle of his sin! Even as he’s saying, “I never heard of the guy,” he sees Jesus looking kindly at him and forgiving him.
And you see, not only is Jesus Christ THERE in our storm, but He’s SYMPATHETICALLY there. He doesn’t hate us when we fall and fail on the slippery slopes of our own Everest. It says in that great Hebrews chapter 4 promise:
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet was without sin.” And now get this: “Let us then approach THE THRONE OF GRACE with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find GRACE to help us in our time of need.”
Two quick points. In Krakauer’s book, Into Thin Air, he confesses some of his own errors and mistakes of judgment which may well have helped cost the lives of others. Some of his own lapses helped leave frozen corpses up on the roof of the world, and he has to work his way through that for the rest of his life. There at Base Camp, the Tibetan Buddhists held to the spiritual idea of sonam – that you had to pile up enough good and holy deeds, maybe over many lifetimes, to finally escape the “cycle of birth and rebirth” and “karma” that holds us all in prison. But how many backpacks would you have to carry for someone else, how many acts of kindness, before the deaths of Andy Harris and Doug Hall and Yasuka Namba are wiped from YOUR account? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply call through the storm and ask Jesus for grace, for a clean slate, for the warm, accepting, rescuing hands of Calvary love to hold you fast?
Second point: this concept of “grace in the storm” is one we borrowed from a recent Christian article written by Pastor Larry Pitcher. And the sweep serendipity is that he is the president of a great outfit called Christian Record Services. These people prepare Bibles and books-on-tape and summer camps for the blind and vision-impaired. Larry ministers to people who, every single day of their lives, face the “whiteout” storm of their own physical handicap. And yet, even in that greatest of all storms, Jesus is there too. Amazing grace is available for the asking. Believe me, nobody can sing it like Larry Pitcher’s friends: Was blind, but now I see.
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