A Guiding Altar

I was hiking in Colorado recently with two friends, one of which is from Colorado and has journeyed this particular hike hundreds of times in her life. Needless to say, this friend served as our guide for the hike where we went down into a canyon and then back up onto a ridge. After a good amount of time had passed, we finally made it to the top where we could look off into the canyon that we had just ventured through. It was a surreal view looking back and seeing how far we had come to get to the top where we now stood. 

The thing about hiking is that it is optional to go up, but it is not optional to come back down. 

So we continued making our way across the ridge and back into the canyon to come full circle from where we had started. As we passed trees and plants and rocks, I began to notice a trend. Every once in a while, I would see a stack of rocks that looked like they were placed there for a specific reason. These rocks weren’t just randomly piled up from some sort of coincidental happenstance. These rocks were stacked biggest to smallest, making what looked like one of those rock-a-stack baby toys in the middle of our trail.

I could not help but think about a book I had read by Barbara Brown Taylor called “An Altar in the World.” In this book, Taylor talks about how neat it would be if everywhere someone met God, they built an altar to serve as a reminder that someone had a divine encounter in that very spot on this very earth. Each pile of rocks that we passed, I imagined a human being having an interaction with God and piling up rocks to signify this experience for everyone to know that in this very spot, they had encountered the living God. 

Just then, my guide friend said, “If you were wondering, these rocks are here to point hikers in the right direction and let them know where the trail is.” It was as if these divine encounters were the very thing that kept people like me (who had never hiked the trail and had no idea which direction to go) headed on the right path. 

All I could think of was “The Lord your God goes before you and behind you. He will be with you wherever you go.” 

It was not two minutes later that my friends and I wandered off the trail and lost sight of all of our guiding altars. We could see a path that resembled a trail, but it was not the way that hikers were meant to go, for this path was not safe. With fewer foot holes, a bleak future, and no altars to guide the way, we were wandering aimlessly in the wilderness, and finally realized that we had wandered off the path. So, we backtracked our steps and found another altar that pointed us in the right direction. Soon enough, we were headed down the ridge and back down into the canyon to make it back to where we had started.

This is what I learned:

If you find yourself wandering off the trail and you don’t see any sign of God, it is ok to backtrack and let the Lord redirect your step, especially if your path is headed nowhere good.

God has made His mark on this earth and on the people who have walked it. It is no small task to recognize a divine encounter and share it with other people—it may be the difference between someone following his path or carelessly falling off of a cliff.

So, build altars for people to see and pay attention to the altars that other people are building around you. For the contact that we make with God is what keeps us on the path of righteousness; this is the difference between life and death.