This past week, a friend challenged me to share my testimony.  Actually, she just wanted to hear how I’d come to love both Jesus and the wilderness; what my journey looked like.  I’ve shared pieces of my testimony here and there on my blog, but never all in one place.  So here’s a go at explaining how a girl from a middle-class family on the east coast somehow ended up with a passionate relationship with Jesus and a love for the wilderness.

In some ways, it all started long before I accepted Jesus as my savior.  My parents are both whole-hearted believers in Christ.  We went to church, but more importantly to my spiritual development, we also prayed together and read the Bible almost every evening.  On Sunday afternoons (and often on weekday evenings) we’d go hiking in the county park behind our neighbor’s property.  I have stories of climbing huge pine trees, building rock dams in the creeks, falling in an icy creek at least once, meeting dogs with blue tongues (it belonged to a church friend), and collecting pretty ferns that grew below the towering pine trees.

When I was 4 or 5, I was watching my older brother complete a school assignment, which was a timeline of his life.  He pasted on stickers of events – when his siblings were born, when he learned to ride a bicycle, and other major and trivial events.  “Don’t forget to do when you accepted Jesus as your personal savior,” my mom told him.  “What’s that?” I wanted to know, and she explained it to me in terms a 5-year-old could understand.  I didn’t understand it – not fully – but I figured if it was good enough for my brother, obviously it was good enough for me.  “Can I do it, too?” I asked my mom.

I’m a firm believer in the fact that I couldn’t possibly have come to God unless He was drawing me.  My logic might have been flawed, but it got me there.  I know it was real – the moment I said the sinner’s prayer, repeating after my mom, I physically felt something shift in my chest.  Mind you, at this point, I had no concept of the Holy Spirit or the supernatural (other than that we all had guardian angels).  I couldn’t have made this up if I’d tried.  Every time I tried to talk about my salvation, that physical feeling would reappear.  I couldn’t explain it – who can explain the workings of the Holy Spirit in their lives?

Within a year, my dad was reassigned to a new boss at work.  “Be a man,” the new boss told him.  “Be a man and take all six weeks of your accrued vacation time this year.”  Maybe it wasn’t the best management decision, but it pushed us toward making the trip my parents had always dreamed of taking – three weeks across the northern North America, visiting parks like Yellowstone, Glacier, and Craters of the Moon along with Canadian parks like Banff, Jasper, and Yoho.

“But the kids are so young,” my mom objected when they started seriously considering the idea.  We’d be 7, 5, 3, and 18 months at the time of the trip.  “They won’t remember it.”

“If we take a trip now,” my dad countered, “we’ll know what places are worth revisiting.  Then we can take another trip when they’re older and they’ll remember it.”

And so, my dad called up national parks asking for information.  Every day, it seemed, pamphlets and brochures came in the mail.  We stacked them up next to the refrigerator for my dad to look at when he got home from work.  He planned out every detail of our trip: where we’d go, how many days we’d spend at each park, what campgrounds we’d stay at.  He didn’t make any reservations because he wasn’t sure this was going to work.  The worst that could happen, he reasoned, was that we’d get out there, find it wasn’t working, turn around, and come home.

And so, after work on a Friday in June, we left on our first cross-continent adventure.  We had three glorious weeks as a family, climbing on badlands, swimming in hot springs, walking on volcanoes, watching Old Faithful and other geysers, feeling the spray of waterfalls at flood stage, watching a train go through the Spiral Tunnel, walking on glaciers, and finally driving home through the safflower fields of northern Canada (you’ve never seen yellow until you’ve seen safflower fields!)  It rained constantly, and not every park turned up roses, but at the very least we had fun.

We had so much fun, in fact, that we took the remaining three weeks of vacation in November.  We visited the southwestern US, exploring places like Grand Canyon, White Sands, and the California coast.  It was cold at times (mornings in Grand Canyon were 19F), and the national park service shut down for several days halfway through the trip, but we had a great time despite the odds.  By then, we knew that we not only could take trips like this; we loved it and we wanted to do it again.

Depending on how you want to look at it, we have taken at least one national park trip (usually across the continent) every year since those first two family vacations (only two years are a stretch – one when we only visited Shenandoah for a few days and the other when we were in Florida in January).  But given how long this post has already become, we’ll pick up next week with how I fell in love with the wilderness.  Stay tuned!