No, I did not have a near death encounter (well, not exactly) nor have I experienced a vision from God of the horrors of entering eternity without Jesus.  What I did do was to spend twenty-four hours straight rock climbing at Horseshoe Canyon Ranch in Arkansas. The event was dubbed Twenty-Four Hours of Horseshoe Hell.  I’m turning forty-seven in a few days, and I have not stayed up for twenty-four hours since my college days, let alone spend the entire time hanging (and falling) off of limestone, part of which was in the pitch dark at heights as high as seventy feet.  My arms and legs literally look as if I was dragged through a gravel pit and I couldn’t even put a shoe on my right foot for three days after.

So why did I do this? Well, part of the answer is the awesome opportunity that it afforded my seventeen year old son Caleb and I to have together, and part of it was my love for climbing.  But the real answer, the truest reason that I spent twenty-four hours squeezing my feet into tiny climbing shoes, living on energy drinks and bloodying my hands on sharp rock edges was just to see if I could do it.  As Rosie the crazy old bush pilot screamed over the silence of his alarmingly dead engine to the panic stricken Tyler in Never Cry Wolf, “And how do you beat boredom, Tyler? … Adventure. Adventure, Tyler.”

You see, all of us men are longing for adventure. Whether it is a marathon rock climbing event, a corporate take over, the hot girl down at the end of the bar, or any other chance to prove ourselves, we are all longing for adventure.  God made us that way.  That’s right; I said God made you that way.  Not the devil, not our society, not sin, but God.  His mandate for man from the beginning was to go out and subdue the earth (see Genesis chapter 1), and then later, as Jesus was explaining our current situation to us He clarifies that “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.  Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matt 10:15).  God placed us in a world of adventure and He has invited us into that adventure.

It’s so sad that we’ve missed that about the Gospel.  It’s so sad that we have turned Christianity into a boring, irrelevant religion; that the only true adventures most of us find are rock climbing or success or perhaps something much more destructive.  I’m certainly not against these lesser adventures, as long as they are pursued honorably and are kept in perspective.  But we must remember: there is so much more.

God has called us, He has called you, into a grand adventure.  It will take all that you are as a man.  You will no doubt feel ill-prepared, overwhelmed, and convinced that you have made a terrible mistake, but those are the very feelings that make all adventures worth pursuing. I experienced every one of those emotions during my Twenty-Four Hours of Horseshoe Hell, but I stayed the course and finished … because I was made for adventure.

To the King,

David