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The Greatest Adventure

Anyone who knows me well knows I love adventure. My three kids love it too, and I feel incredibly blessed to be able share with them things like rock climbing, mountain climbing, and hiking. I play hockey with my boys and mountain bike on my lunch hour. When I see a massive mountain or a sheer rock face, my blood begins to stir and the adrenaline flows! There’s the challenge of it, the risk, the excitement, the danger. My wife just thinks I’m crazy because she’s been on a few of my adventures and she says it mostly just involves a lot of pain and suffering and hard work, which is not her idea of a fun vacation. Now, I’m no Bear Grylls (Man vs. Wild) mind you (I draw the line at squeezing drinking water out of elephant dung, or biting off the heads of live frogs before eating their body), but I could easily get carried away and set my sites on Mt. Everest, or better yet K2. So what stops me? Well, there is such a thing as responsibility. Extreme adventuring can be a pretty self-absorbed lifestyle. So I just dabble in adventure. But I don’t feel I’m missing out, because there’s an adventure that surpasses all that the world has to offer. Any fully devoted disciple of Christ knows it and experiences it on a daily basis. The adventure of living your life for Jesus and relying on God in faith and having an eternal impact on others is the greatest adventure of all.

When I think of adventure, I think of the apostle Paul—the Bear Grylls of the New Testament. He spent the last 30 years of his life living one adventure after another as he traveled the Roman Empire spreading the gospel. He faced angry mobs, was often beaten and imprisoned, sailed through terrible storms, was shipwrecked at least three times, had been “on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from countryman, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among false brethren, in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure….” (2 cor 11.23-27). My wife would say that sounds like one our backpacking trips, but not even Bear Grylls can measure up to Paul’s adventures. There were no helicopters to pull Paul out if things got too dangerous, no hotels to sleep in at night while filming, no staged reenactments, no camera crews to back you up if you got in trouble. Paul’s was the real deal. But that’s not the adventure part. If you were to ask Paul about his adventures, I doubt he would talk about those things. More likely he would tell you with great excitement about leading someone out of the darkness of sin and spiritual error into the light of truth and salvation. He would probably tell you about learning to trust in and depend completely on God for an uncertain future. His adrenaline would probably begin to flow as he talked about the great adventure of coming to know Jesus Christ his Lord (Phil 3.8).

One of my favorite quotes that has gone around the internet is this: "Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow - What a ride!'" One website attributed this quote to a Peter Sage, but Paul said it simpler: “I will most gladly spend and be expended for your souls” (2 Cor 12.15). That’s the real adventure. And it doesn’t require biting off the heads of frogs.