I’ve got a thing for road pictures. I love seeing a path and thinking about its meanings. I’ve stood in the ruts of the Santa Fe Trail, the Chism Trail, and the Goodnight-Loving Trail just imagining the oxen, mules, horses and cattle that have moved along them. I fantasize about the adventure that awaited those who completed it. I’ve read books and the journals of Lewis and Clark and dreamed of the vastness and mystery of such a journey into the unknown. From the stories of Daniel Boone to Jedediah Smith, I’ve read and reflected on what it would have been like to walk away from the familiar and to wake each morning to new discoveries. I have photos of winter encampments in remote areas of Colorado with elaborate carvings in the rocks. I’ve found faded etchings where Kit Carson scratched his name into an overhang while camping, protected from the elements. My mind races as I think of what it was like, and how I might have fared.
Each of us blazes a different trail; we aren’t the first, but the trail is new to us. We look for the markers as well, the blazes on spiritual trees where others have walked before us. The Bible is more like the journals of the early pioneers than a Rand McNally map, showing the way forward. As the pioneers would have described “bearing west by northwest until you hit the Platte River”, the pioneers of Scripture describe walking in “the fear of the Lord” or “fixing our eyes on Jesus”.
Early pioneers cautioned against overloading wagons, taking unnecessary items and Scripture urges us to “lay aside every sin and the burdens that so easily entangle us”. We heed the advice of those who have gone before or we, like those who fell along the early pioneer trails, will fall along the way, unable to complete the journey.
We take this spiritual trip together, a bit like a wagon train. The adventure lies before us, and each night, as we offer our evening prayers and whisper our dreams to the night air, remember to point that wagon tongue to the North Star.
Super analogy