Reflections | Spelunking, Heart-Change, and Child-Like Maturity

Years ago, a friend invited me to go spelunking (cave-exploring for the uninitiated). On this unique (for me) adventure, my friend, having some experience, was 100% leader and I was 100% follower. I know I’ve mentioned before that I struggle with some Serious trust-fear issues. But what harm could come from exploring a cave? I thought. “Bring a jacket and a flashlight, and wear some grubby shoes,” he said. No problem.

I brought a jacket, a handheld flashlight, and some old, slicked-off running shoes and set off with my friend toward the Tongue River Cave system near Dayton, Wyoming (photo unavailable), which is over a hundred feet in depth (I learned after the fact), more than a mile of multi-leveled passages. A channel of the Little Tongue River still runs through the bottom of one of two river channels that evidently cut the giant, crevice-like system over time.[1] This was no ordinary cave. In my naivete, all I saw at the front-end of the trip was a pleasant hike and a door in the earth that looked like a great place for a mama bear to set up a nursery...

“Just jump.” It didn’t take long for my survival engine to start firing. I stood on a ledge with something like a 30-foot drop below, another ledge across from me, and several feet of air to clear to get to it. I’m 5’3 ½” and these legs don’t jump like that. If memory serves, my refusal caused us to have to take a less desirable route from there.

About 750 feet in, the open cave appears to end but for a very small hole at the bottom of one wall, just big enough to crawl through. I don’t remember how long the little tunnel was in length, but I’ll never forget singing, “I will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor, to ward off claustrophobic panic while belly-crawling through what felt like the small intestine of the earth. We did survive, and the cave soon opened up again.

By this time, it was possible to turn off our flashlights and experience the Complete Absence of light... Did you know that pure darkness is palpable? You can feel it on your skin... Or, it was just incredibly humid. But I digress... It was also about this time that the possibility of accidentally dropping our lights into the abyss below our climb, or our batteries going dead, (or, or, or...) settled on the surface of my consciousness. Who would come get us if we lost our light? How many days (weeks? months?) would we sit in palpable darkness before another spelunker came along to rescue us?

It’s interesting that, in the full takeover of Fear, the need to trust in someone, or something, becomes critical—whether or not that someone, or something, is suitable to play the role (no offense, friend). In the grip of fear, my sphere of focus (visually, mentally, emotionally) shrunk. I ceased to be a curious co-participant in the adventure and became fixed to the only person within reach with more circumstantial capacity than I had.

There was a lot of climbing, jumping, and maneuvering over and through boulders and formations to keep moving forward, during most of which, all I saw was what was inside the sphere of light coming from my guide-friend’s flashlight while I struggled to navigate one obstacle after another. First I shook with fear, and then with exhaustion. But as we progressed, I began to gain confidence in my ability to jump, climb, straddle, grip, and pull myself up and over, even with slicked-off shoes.

We finally arrived at a narrow fissure near the end of the system, where tiny juts on both sides of the split wall of rock served as footholds to straddle our way over the crack below. I believe now that fear-fatigue is a thing; it just loses its potency with over-use, like a drug. Several yards in, with strength depleted and uncertain whether I had enough left in my tank to get back to the surface, I finally cried “uncle” and we turned around to make the return trip, this time working our way uphill instead of down.

It was only on the drive back home that my friend shared what I couldn’t see outside the sphere of his flashlight beam as we climbed—the deep, water-carved crevices over which we had been navigating, intermittently gaping below us in the black darkness. He knew that, if I had been able to see the danger, I would not have had the courage to meet the challenge and keep going. But with just enough light to see the obstacles right in front of me, I did something far outside my comfort zone and beyond any previous physical accomplishments. I defied my fear on a monumental level, and with critical help, defied the Fearsome.

Now, I realize that there is much in this story to take issue with regarding proper preparation and protection, guidance for the untrained, and perhaps wisdom itself in more than a few instances. But the memory surfaced recently in a thoughtful conversation with friends and has proved to be profoundly applicable.

In that conversation, a sub-question sprouted from the main question, catching me up in days of contemplation: How does the heart (of a follower of Jesus) change over time? Honestly, I didn’t make it very far in my thinking before the cave memory popped up and plopped down front and center. (I’ll take the help where I can get it.) Here it is the epiphany (there are a lot of epiphanies in my internal world, calling into question the use of the word “epiphany”:

 The cave and all that is described above is an apt picture of what the inside of my heart looks like, or at least looked like at the time this adventure took place, in my late twenties and very young spiritual life. Looking at the cave system as a picture of my heart at that time, my nature and first impulse is to see a giant hunk of stone with deep, rugged crevices (mistakes, wounds, and scars) jagging down the middle, that I cut with thousands and decades of poor life-choices. And to some degree, that’s true. But it isn’t the whole truth. Much went into the carving and shaping of my heart, and many actors played a part in it. But only One has truly orchestrated the long-suffered work of art that it will one day be.

God sent the very first stream of life-water down the particular channel he intended for me to travel, forming me in my mother’s womb. He knew the inmost parts of my future finished heart before the first cut broke the surface of it, along with all my days before a single one was played out (Psalm 139). He knew the plans and purposes he was preparing me to live out in the world, while simultaneously granting me freedom to exercise my will and creativity in living out those days.

God also knew the incurable prognosis of my sin nature, imbedded in the core of my heart from birth and certain to mar his artwork. He knew that the powers of evil and my many life-choices born from sin would drastically alter the course of my life, even spilling over to mar other people’s lives. Likewise, he knew the ways that others would sin against me before I had the cognizance or power to resist, further marring his work. Yet he granted us all the freedom of will to do these things... And all of this being only one microscopic example in the universal dynamic of human brokenness.

Standing at the proverbial mouth of the cave that was my heart on the day that I surrendered to Jesus and the Holy Spirit took his place to lead me forward, I had absolutely no idea what to expect—what he would show me, what he would do to me, or where he would take me. I knew the hard, cracked, bleeding contours of my heart had been set in stone for a very long time, and had no idea how long it was going to take for him to make me into what he envisioned. Honestly, I didn’t wholly trust him with it. That has turned out to be a lifetime process.

But I did, and do, know this: Nothing that happened in my past to that point was going to un-happen. None of it was going to be put back into the bottle and it had all contributed to, shaped, and solidified the contours and complexities of who I had become—planned directions and diabolical disruptions, critical bonds and catastrophic breaks, destructive assaults and timely interventions, chosen pursuits and horrific mistakes, famines and erosions, storms and quakes. Furthermore, the roots of my sin-nature would be with me until the day I die or Jesus comes back, whichever comes first. It was what it was. And now, here was the Spirit of God, having bought me for a blood-price, now setting out just ahead of me on a journey to bring change.

But what change? The question has expanded now. How does a heart, cut out of stone and with an incurable disease, change? Moreover, what changes and what doesn’t?

This is what it must have felt like for Joseph, Moses, and David to look back over the journey of their lives. There’s a pattern in the retelling of their (and many others’) stories: They begin by revealing a particular vein of raw, childish passion and hints at a divine purpose. Then, some form of painfully unexpected detour occurs that undeniably proves their complete inadequacy to accomplish the hinted-at purpose on their own, even causing moments of doubt that there really was one.

The unexpected detour leads into an interminably long season of painful disillusioning and dry conditioning that feels more like punishment than progress. But, over time, the process whittles and shapes each man into the humble, obedient, and specially-skilled person they will need to be to step into the passions and purposes first dreamt of.

And finally, the moment arrives for maturity born in process to be set into full motion, with the chosen carriers of that purpose fully prepared to walk it out, in full submission to God’s sovereign will. I’m not suggesting that we all have storybook “heroism” in our futures. But we do all have divine purposes for which we are being shaped and prepared as we labor under God’s transforming hand.

These stories of heart-change help make sense out of a confusing process that we all go through, and there is a plethora of wisdom offered in Scripture pertaining to the subject of the transformation of our hearts. But something that Jesus said to his disciples has persistently pushed its way to the front in this reflection time.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

                                                                        Matthew 18:1-4 (emphasis mine)

Of course, this isn’t news to the seasoned follower of Jesus but, honestly, haven’t we all been locked in a lifetime battle with our desire to become “the greatest” in one way or another? Not that we shouldn’t strive for the excellencies that we were designed to be, do, and reflect. Our image-bearing parts were made for deep, God-sourced satisfaction, security, and significance. Our cancerous sin-nature has mutated those desires into lust, greed, and pride. And this setting us on a path of chronic striving toward self-gratification, self-protection, and self-aggrandizement. Are these not in direct opposition to the process of transformation God is working at in us?

...unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven...”

I can almost hear Jesus whispering that statement in my ear as I stand wedged in a narrow crack of a humongous rock, a hundred feet underground, that is soon to close entirely ahead of me, putting an end to any advancement in the direction I was heading.

It strikes me now that the journey through the cave had nothing to do with changing the shape of the cave, and everything to do with respecting an environment that had long been shaped and solidified by a lifetime of water-wear and outside forces of nature. It wasn’t about changing the cave. It was about learning to work with what had been formed; taking on one challenge after another; following my guide every step of the way as he patiently shone his light where he wanted me to focus. So... it was about allowing the environment, the guide, and the obstacles to develop something in me. Is this something akin to becoming childlike?

How much of my life have I spent trying to change my environment (and running when I couldn’t), or trying to change the people around me so that I wouldn’t have to change (and walking away when I couldn’t do that either)? Now we’re getting down to the meat of it.

Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

                                                                                          John 8:12

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.

                                                                                          Galatians 5:16-17

Having begun to consider the process of heart-change, it would be a shame to stop short of looking forward in anticipation to the completion of change at the end of it all.

Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.

                                                                                          1 Corinthians 15:51-53

Likewise, it would be a shame to miss the shadow of Israel’s story in these stories. But that’s another conversation for another day...

Maranatha.

[1] https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/nature/wyoming/the-little-known-cave-in-wy-everyone-should-explore