Retreating With God

RETREATING WITH GOD

FINDING YOUR PASSION IN THE BEAT OF GOD’S HEART

BERRY SIMPSON

Published by Stonefoot Media, Smashwords edition

Copyright © 2010 by Berry Simpson

Smashwords Edition, License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is dedicated to

Cyndi Simpson, keeper of my heart

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: TEJAS TRAIL: MAR 2004

Texture of the earth

Hard on the outside

Raining

You can learn me

Finishing the climb

Sleeping

I don’t sleep by myself very often

Daylight

Afraid to look silly

CHAPTER TWO: WILD AT HEART CAMPS: 2003-2008

My new name

Do you want to be healed?

How do I see myself as a man?

What do I fear others say about me?

What is important to me?

What are my tendencies?

What are my true strengths?

Who do I want to be when I grow up?

On Mt. Princeton

Driving too fast

Can I do this?

How big it is

CHAPTER THREE: BACK TO THE GUADALUPES: JAN 2005

The tattoo

100 steps, 20 breaths

Knowing the names

The right guy

Understanding grace

Worshiping at Pine Top

A Tuesday night conversation

Walkabout with Jesus

Falling apart

Cyndi crashed

Driving home from the dance

How much time do we have?

First hike up Guadalupe Peak

January 2005: Driving home

The things I like most about Cyndi

The things about you that used to confuse me, but now I am OK with

The things I still don’t understand about you ever after all these years

The things I wish you would do more often

CHAPTER FOUR: PINE TOP: MAY 2006

CHAPTER FIVE: PALM SPRINGS: OCT 2006

One evening

Practitioner

Without a guide

Mt. San Jacinto

First kiss

Mini skirt

Memories

Hands in the air

CHAPTER SIX: PINE TOP: MAY 2007

Hunter Peak

Rock Cairns

Gear

Time with God

CHAPTER SEVEN: WILDERNESS RIDGE: MAY 2008

Permian Reef Trail

What was lost

Lincoln National Forest

Solitude

Closed to all visitors

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE BOWL: JUNE 2009

Remembering

Inventory

Search my heart

Breathless

Pine Top once more

Guard your heart

Juniper Trail

Relationships

Scuffed rocks

Going home

What are you looking for?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

RUNNING WITH GOD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

My first trip up Tejas Trail was in the cold rain and snow, and I was not ready for it. All the way up the trail I worried about my lack of preparation. I didn’t have the right clothes to stay dry and warm, and I didn’t have the right gear for camping on the snow. On my second trip up Tejas Trail, I was cold again, but dry. My third time up Tejas Trail, I was eventually chased back down the mountain by flies. My fourth time up the trail was the best trip of all. That is, until my fifth - and my sixth.

This adventure began one afternoon when I heard the question, How do you feed your heart? and answering that question changed the trajectory of my life. I understood I had to live more intentionally. I had to place more value on the times of solitude and introspection, physical movement, and time with Cyndi. I knew had to go alone into the mountains.

My solo backpacking trips have become solitary retreats into the heart of God. I’ve traveled into the desert mountains to be by myself and live inside my own head. I’ve heard from God best and loudest when alone, while covering ground with my feet. I’ve learned to be myself with God, not expecting a direct answer to a specific question, but to simply hang out with him and to experience his reality. I’ve learned to be intentional about searching for God, intentional about loving my wife, intentional about rehabbing and strengthening my bum knees, and intentional about guarding my heart.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized I can’t separate my understanding of God from my relationships and from my heart; especially my relationship with my wife, Cyndi. It all gets mixed together, just like my stories. Feeding my heart has become a constant process of stepping deeper into those critical relationships

That first hike up Tejas Trail was a deliberate move toward my own heart, and I am a better man because of it.

CHAPTER ONE: TEJAS TRAIL

MARCH 2004

I started hiking Thursday morning in the rain. The parking lot at the Pine Springs Visitor Center at Guadalupe Mountains National Park was empty, which seemed natural because who would go to the mountains on such a dismal rainy day? It was March, Spring Break, and my wife Cyndi was enjoying her days away from school by visiting our daughter in Dallas. The timing was perfect to do something I’d wanted to do for so long. However, I never expected the weather to be so cold and wet in the desert mountains of West Texas.

For years I dreamed of going backpacking, going up into the mountains all by myself with everything I might need hanging on my back, always planning but never actually doing anything about it. I would be more accurate to say backpacking had been howling in the back of my brain for 40 years. I had wanted to be a backpacker since I was a youngster, but ‘never’ seemed to always get in the way – never able to work out the details, never seemed to have the right gear, never had enough free time. I hoped this first trip up Tejas Trail marked the next phase of my life; one that I hoped would be a long phase.

About two-thirds of the way up to the crest of the mountain, where the steeply climbing trail finally flattened out a bit, the rain turned to snow flurries. The snow melted as soon as it landed and wasn’t accumulating on the ground, but I knew snow in the air down here meant it was snowing harder up on top of the mountain where I was headed. It was beautiful, but it was also a little frightening. I was backpacking with a cobbled-together kit, and I knew I didn’t have anything sufficient for camping on top of snow. It made me nervous to think about sleeping all night in a cold tent pitched on a snow field, but I kept going up despite my concerns. The only thing worse than camping on snow was turning around and going back home.

I’d already done too much turning around in my life. While it’s true that I’d completed seven marathons by then, I was haunted by the two other marathons that I’d attempted but couldn’t finish because I couldn’t handle the discomfort. And there were many more attempts that I backed away from before race day because the long training runs were too painful or inconvenient. I also knew that running marathons was just a metaphor for other things in my life that I’d backed away from when they got hard. I was tired of backing away from hard things.

Texture of the earth

When I was a young boy, I used to go with my parents to a church camp in northern New Mexico, near Pecos, called the Glorieta Baptist Conference Center. I remember I spent a lot of time hiking alone in the woods. In the afternoon when everyone else in the family was taking naps, I would walk into the woods by myself to explore and pretend to be an Indian who set animal traps and hunted for new trails. I did it every day, and it never got old.

Back home in Kermit, Texas, I used to go out into the mesquite pasture near my house to go rabbit hunting with the family’s single-shot 22 rifle. Hunting rabbits was really an excuse to go hiking in the pasture. I didn’t care that much about shooting rabbits, but hiking sounded weird to most of my friends. Hunting didn’t sound weird at all, so I went hunting.

We used to do a lot of car camping as a family in the Davis Mountains of Texas, and I remember how much fun I always had. But I didn’t want to do that at this time in my life. Car camping wasn’t the adventure I was after. It seemed a lot of trouble to drive to a campground and haul out all my stuff and set up camp and sit around among the trees. I enjoyed spending time away from home reading and writing, but I didn’t need to go to the trouble of camping to do that. I knew I would enjoy backpacking more because I could keep my feet moving. I didn’t actually want to look at nature; I wanted to interact with nature. I wanted to move. I wanted to cover ground, feel the texture of the earth under my feet, and feel the changing terrain.

As I got older, married and had a family, it seemed like my weekends were always taken up by school or church responsibilities, so I never had an opportunity to go to the mountains. Or maybe it was because I didn’t have any cool backpacking equipment, or maybe the whole adventure appeared childish and goofy, and I was embarrassed to make a big deal of it. It seemed too indulgent and selfish to buy the gear and spend the time, just for me alone, not for the family. I didn’t understand the value backpacking would have on my heart.

I did make a couple of Boy Scout backpacking trips with my son Byron, an Eagle Scout, and they were fun. But Byron grew up and finished Scouts and moved to Dallas to attend college, and the opportunity to go back to the mountains with him ended for a while.

So I just gave up on my dream of backpacking through those years. However, once both kids went off to college and my weekends were freer, and I had a bit more money to buy gear, well, my urge to go into the mountains came howling back. It haunted me for a couple of years before I finally did something about it.

I actually started planning my first trip into the Guadalupe Mountains while driving down Interstate 20 from Dallas to Midland. Cyndi and I had been in Dallas helping our son Byron move into his new apartment. We were also bringing his washer and dryer back to Midland since he didn’t have room for them in his new place. It was a long hard day, and we were exhausted even before we started the five-hour drive home. We ate dinner with Byron, said our goodbyes, and finally started driving back in the late afternoon. It was a Saturday, and we had to get back home that night so I could teach my adult Bible study class Sunday morning, and so Cyndi could work in the church media group for the morning services.

While driving west on Interstate 20, we listened to an audio book by John Eldredge. In reality, I did most of the listening since I was the one driving. Cyndi fell asleep soon after we started rolling. I stayed alert driving by listening and thinking about Eldredge’s comments until we were roughly ten miles west of Weatherford. In the middle of my contemplation, I barely avoided an accident on the Interstate. I saw it happen in my side mirror. The traffic at the time was full, but not crowded, all driving 70 miles per hour. There were vehicles in all three lanes for as far as I could see, forward or behind, but we weren’t bumper-to-bumper. This amount of interstate traffic was typical so near Fort Worth. I was driving in the center lane and made a routine glance in the left side mirror just in time to see a black pickup moving up beside me in the left lane. Suddenly, the pickup skidded sideways with the passenger side moving forward, then flipped into the air and started rolling down the highway, side-over-side. I saw all of this in a momentary glance in my mirror. It is a cliché to say this entire scene seemed to happen in slow motion, but that’s exactly how I remember it. I instinctively hit the accelerator to move out of the way of the rolling truck and any flying debris. It all happened so fast, in a blink. And in another blink, just like that, we were hundreds of yards past the accident moving at 100 feet-per-second. We were miles from the next exit, and all the cars and trucks around me just kept driving. There was nothing else to do. It happened too fast, and we were too long gone to stop and help.

My own heart was racing in my chest from what I’d just seen. It all happened so fast I didn’t even wake Cyndi. In fact, the whole episode was so scary I didn’t tell her about it until weeks later. But the adrenaline rush from the moment, from an accident that could have taken us out with it, put me on edge.

And then, because the audio book was still playing, I heard Eldredge ask, When was the last time you did something specifically to feed your heart? Whoa. That question bored straight into me. I pushed the pause button on the CD player and drove on in silence for awhile to think about what he’d asked in context with the accident I’d just witnessed. I thought about that question for the next hour as I drove in silence. I couldn’t shake it off. I decided I had to start making plans right then to do something for my heart.

I pressed the play button on the CD player and heard John describe a solo backpacking trip he made into the desert mountains near Moab, Utah. He went to get alone, to get quiet, to listen to God, and to feed his heart. I decided I should do the same thing as soon as possible. I didn’t want to spend any more time not paying attention to my heart. Who knew when my truck might be flipping over on the Interstate.

I ran a mental inventory of all the places I could go to be by myself without having to travel too far or spend too much money. I thought about going to Junction to a friend’s ranch where I could run along the South Llano River and up on the bluff, but it didn’t seem wild enough. And the more Eldredge talked about the desert, I thought about hiking into the Guadalupe Mountains.

Spring Break was only a few weeks away, and I knew Cyndi, an elementary school teacher, would take advantage of the week away from school by driving to Dallas to help our daughter Katie plan her wedding, buy clothes, and all those things women like to do together. I hadn’t planned to join them; it didn’t sound like much fun to me; so it was a good time to go to the mountains. I was a little nervous about going by myself because I didn’t want Cyndi to think I was trying to get away from her, but I saw Spring Break as a guilt-free chance. All the way home to Midland, while Cyndi slept, while John Eldredge talked on my CD player, I planned my trip. The next Monday morning after we got back, I phoned Joe Chapman, the Boy Scout leader at my church, and asked to borrow a backpack.

I’d spent too many years not worrying about the condition of my heart. So maybe I spent a lot of time taking care of my physical heart, but not my spiritual heart. If Satan could harden my heart, he could cripple my ministries and destroy my relationships and sour my close communion with God. Satan attacked my heart regularly through over-booked calendars, important roles and assignments, people who irritated me and stirred up my anger and resentment. I knew I could not hope to keep my heart open to God in the long run unless I took diligent action. In my case, that meant quiet and solitude along with movement. I knew I had to do something intentional, right now, to feed my heart.

Hard on the outside

Annie Dillard wrote, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without. I don’t know if she ever visited the Guadalupe Mountains, but her description fit them well. Everything you see about the Guadalupes, at least from the outside, is hard, steep, prickly, and pointed. The Beautiful places are up high and inside. They are hard to get to and almost impossible to see from the highway down below.

The Guadalupe Mountains are located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The range includes the highest summit in Texas, Guadalupe Peak, 8,749 ft. and the signature peak of West Texas, El Capitan. The mountains were occupied in ancient times by Pueblo and Mogollon peoples, and later in the 19th century by Apaches. Once the Mescalero Apache got horses (from the Spaniards, who arrived in the 1500s), they dominated the Southwest and made the Guadalupes their fortress.

In 1840 Captain Randolph Marcy discovered springs at the foot of the mountains. Later, John Butterfield built one of his stage coach changing stations near Pine Springs. On September 25, 1858, the first westbound stage met the first eastbound stage on the desert beneath the high cliffs of El Capitan. This route lasted for about a year until pressure from the environment and the Apaches moved it further south.

Lieutenant H. B. Cushing and his mounted cavalry unit surprised an Apache camp up high in an area known nowadays as The Bowl during Christmas 1869. They destroyed over ten tons of mescal root, leaving the Apaches without food for the winter. There were other battles between cavalry and Apaches through the years, but by 1880 it was all over. The Apache lost.

Wallace Pratt, a successful geologist and oil finder, came to the area in 1921 and bought land in McKittrick Canyon. Pratt later donated 6,000 acres to the National Park Service, prompting Congress to create the park.

Rancher J. C. Hunter built a large ranch in the Guadalupes area, laying a water line from a high country spring down Bear Canyon to provide water for a sheep operation. The holding tanks for his water and many of his transport pipes are still in place in The Bowl and in Bear Canyon.

On October 15, 1966, Congress established the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. The park was officially dedicated in 1972, and Congress set aside 46,850 acres, about 60% of the park, as wilderness area.

This is an isolated range surrounded in all directions by desert. Few people visit here because there are no scenic drives up into the high country and few destinations that don’t require climbing 3,000’ elevation. The Guadalupes are as lonely a national park as you'll find outside Alaska, especially in the winter months when mild temperatures make it one of the best backpacking destinations in the country. It's a wilderness park with few amenities. Backpacking your way up into the higher elevations of the Guadalupes is hard work, all the more so because you have to carry all the water you'll need. All of these factors worked perfectly into my scenario. The mountains were quiet, mostly deserted, and there were plenty of trails to keep me moving.

Raining

It was raining that morning in Midland before I left home for the three-hour drive to the mountains. The rain had fallen all night, but I didn’t think it would last long into the day. I had to keep convincing myself of that as I loaded my gear. I certainly didn’t expect rain in the desert mountains. I had reasoned in my own mind that this trip was too important to me for the rain to continue all day. Besides, I didn’t have any more weekends available for months afterward, so I had to go. Surely God would stop the rain. Just in case, I packed a few extra plastic trash bags with my gear so I could cover my stuff to keep it dry.

I left my house about 6:00 AM while it was still dark. I took Interstate 20 west to Pecos, Texas, where I made my first stop for gas. My first big obstacle of the trip, if you don’t count the continuing rain, happened then. After gassing up at the Flying J Truck Stop, I couldn’t get my Jeep to start. I cranked it over and over until I was afraid I’d run down the battery, and then sat in the driver’s seat and prayed, OK, Lord, what is this all about? You sent me on this trip to work over my heart. Now I’m sitting at a truck stop, the rain is still falling, and my Jeep won’t start. What am I supposed to do now? Is this a test to see how badly I want to get alone with you, or is it a message from you telling me to turn around and go back home, that hiking in the rain is stupid? Which is it? I was discouraged, and suddenly, I felt very alone.

I went inside the truck stop and phoned a local repair shop that I found by looking in the Yellow Pages. They said they would come to the truck stop and tow my jeep to their shop and see what was wrong. I resented spending money for something as trivial as a tow truck, but I had no other choice. Whether I went on to the mountains or turned back home to Midland, I could do neither