“The narrow path with Jesus for me has been exhilarating, but also lonely and difficult,” wrote Grace Hsiao Hanford on her blog, incarnatethinking.org.
As I read through Grace’s posts, that statement leaped out at me. What she described has been my experience too. I love to tell about the exhilaration because, typically, people don’t expect to find any such thing on the narrow road. Thank you, Grace, for reminding me to acknowledge the loneliness and difficulty, as well. Otherwise, I’m falsely advertising a nonstop high, and people seeking as much will quickly turn back.
It’s Jesus, and his Father and his Spirit, who make the narrow path glorious. If I seek only exhilaration, I’ll miss him. If I try to run from loneliness and difficulty, I’ll miss him. Yet, just as walking with Jesus isn’t all exhilaration, it also isn’t resigning myself to a hard-knocks life.
As in the days of the Exodus, the Lord does not lead his people into the wilderness to settle there. He goes with us to lead us through. Traveling with him, I pass through difficulties. I learn from them. Facing obstacles that prove increasingly hard to conquer, I experience again and again what Scripture describes: I become more than a conqueror through Christ who loves me.
Honestly, though, in the big middle of the desert places, I can feel weary and lonely and stuck. Even when I review God’s promises and rehearse his character, my mind may continue to list all the reasons to opt for the wide path. My emotions, eager to return to Egypt, may continue pitching a fit.
Those days, my Lord by his Spirit comforts and strengthens me. Sometimes, he rebukes in love, like the mother who matter-of-factly tells her toddler, “That’s a fit.” Sometimes, the Lord says simply, “Come to me, and I will give you rest.”
Then, when I have regrouped, he draws me forward, onward, like a magnet in my inmost being. As I respond to him, choosing my Lord over my soul’s loud cries to turn back, I take another next step I didn’t think I could. Marveling at an intimacy that is stronger than emotion and surer than knowledge, I go with God.
Friend of Jesus, be blessed to experience the glory of walking the narrow way with him.
Update 2019: Grace has taken down the blog mentioned in this post.
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Hi, Grace. Thank you so much for your additional thoughts! One thing I love about your statement that I quoted – and about the outlook of your blog posts in general – is your honesty in embracing the “both/and” of the narrow path. Many Christians want to emphasize only the blessings. Other Christians focus solely on the hardships. Yet to embrace both in the context of truly, personally knowing God is to embrace life. It’s also to invite great surprise and wonder, because there’s something substantively different about both the difficulty and the exhilaration when we’re seeking to walk as one with our Lord. Substantively different – and almost indescribable. So here we are, learning to experience the indescribable, and groping for words to describe it.
Humbled by the reference, Deborah.
True, true! The narrow way, the walk in the valley of the shadow of death, suffering, dying to self—these are the parts of the Gospel few seem to highlight. (Gee, I wonder, why not?)
But in them are an opportunity to meet God the living and true and quite literal Savior, to put yourself in a position to see and know the things from God that are undeniably not-from-man. Like Jacob who wrestled, whose name thereafter changed to One-who-Prevails-with-God (Israel), it is an opportunity to know God as your own God, to know that you truly have a relationship with God himself.
In a big way, is that not what life is really all about?