We Stood Upon Stars: Finding God in Lost Places - Softcover

Thompson, Roger W.

 
9781601429599: We Stood Upon Stars: Finding God in Lost Places
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1601429592 ISBN 13: 9781601429599
Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Get Lost. . . and Find What Really Matters
 
We are made for freedom and adventure, friendship and romance. Yet too much of life is spent unfulfilled at work, restless at home, and bored at church.  All the while knowing there is something more. You’ll find some of life’s best moments waiting for you over a campfire, on a river—even in that coffee shop or brewery you didn’t know you’d discover along the way. It’s time to begin the search.
 
In the literary spirit of well-worn tales about America’s open road, this poetic, honest, often hilarious collection of essays shows how to embark on adventures that kindle spiritual reflection, personal growth, and deeper family connections.
 
From surfing California’s coastlines, stargazing southwestern deserts, and fly-fishing in remote mountains of Montana, you’ll be inspired to follow the author’s footsteps and use the hand-drawn maps from each chapter to plan your own trips.  There you will hear God’s voice – and it may help you find what you’re searching for.
 
“We search mountaintops and valleys, deserts and oceans, hoping sunrises and long views through the canyons will help us discover who we are, or who we still want to be.  The language of our hearts reflects that of creation because in both are fingerprints of God.”
—Roger W. Thompson

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ROGER W. THOMPSON is a successful entrepreneur, collaborator, adventurer, and writer. He’s spent his career building innovative businesses and nonprofit organizations. In addition to creating the first mission tourism resort in Haiti with the Hands and Feet Project, he’s produced surf films, built skate parks, and outfitted adventure trips. Alongside his wife, he travels, surfs, snowboards, and fly-fishes—and is teaching his two young sons to do the same.

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Introduction

A Word About Maps

I make a lot of wrong turns. They come easily. A slight distraction or curiosity and I’m down a washboard road rattling my van and teeth, making for a distant landmark. The turns come after full consultation of the maps. I’ll study the topography for hours, memorizing mountains and watersheds. I’ll glance at the roads as well, but I’ve traveled enough to know roads of men can’t always be trusted. It’s better to trust in immovable things.

We make our homes in this world as best we can. We scratch at the earth to make a living or to make a difference, and always we have a feeling there is something more. Something missing. So we search.

We search mountaintops and valleys, deserts and oceans. We hope sunrises and long views through canyons will help us discover who we are or who we still want to be. We also search our own inner landscapes and describe our emotional and spiritual state with topographical language. Love like an ocean. Grief like a desert. Peace like a river. The language of our hearts reflects the language of creation because in both are fingerprints of God.

This book is filled with maps of sacred places to help in the search. The details of each map were gathered from personal travels or from those of close friends. They lead to secret shorelines that will deepen our love for our wives and to rivers where we cast a line with fishing buddies who, through wild trout and campfires, will become enduring friends. These maps lead to distant lakes where in safety we can cry out our hopes and shames and hear mountains echo with assurances that we are not alone.

Individually these maps propose specific adventures throughout the West. They highlight fishing holes and wilderness and the best breweries to help cap the day. Collectively these roads through the wilderness present the map of a man’s heart.

While traveling I’ll often veer onto a road that wasn’t on my route. This is the beginning of adventure. It’s how I’ve discovered tiny towns and sunsets and secret fishing holes and the Philipsburg Brewing Companyin Montana. It’s also how I’ve gotten myself desperately lost. And since it takes an act of Congress to get me to turn around, I keep going over switchbacks and single-lane roads until either the curiosity is cured or I run out of snacks. Before turning back I get out and survey the landscape, looking to mountain peaks or rivers or stars for clues. It’s always there, deep in the wilderness, with my wife or my kids or my buddies or alone, where—in desperation for answers or simply curiousity—I am met by God.

My hope is these stories and maps will help you with your own adventures and discoveries. That you’ll go to the edge of your known world. Then a little beyond. And that in lost places you’ll find what it is you’re searching for.

Travel well,
Roger

1

The Light That Has Always Been

Joshua Tree National Park, California

I live on the western edge of the continent, under the storied shadows of great men. And I wonder if I ever can become one of them.

Grandpa rode out of the Oklahoma dust bowl on the back of a Harley Davidson after the Great Depression. His father, my great-grandfather, was driving. To make better time, his father tied Grandpa to his body with a rope so Grandpa could sleep without falling off. Though in oven winds, sleep seldom came.

The motorcycle’s engine labored as it bled gasoline from the carburetor, acrid air smelling of metal and burnt fuel. The heat rose from volcanic depths of the Earth, radiating through an endless strip of tar laid by desperate men working government projects to put meat in the bellies of their children. The wind brought no relief, nor did the night. For days they traveled, through sand and bleached-bone deserts, bound to one another and bound to a hope that things would be better in the West.

The Harley Davidson 45 was a workingman’s bike, within reach of even a Depression-era preacher such as my great-grandfather. The leather seats still smelled of farmyards near where the Harley was built, and the flathead engine was the most dependable design of any bike its age. Even when something would go wrong, an owner with a basic set of tools and an average knowledge of engines could repair it. In this way it was most American.

The heart of the flathead beat through valves in a sideways rhythm, giving the bike a slight tremor as the two rode west. Accompanied only by engine noise and thought and sounds of a wind, it seemed they had all of America to themselves. And with nothing separating them from the heat and the dust, the motorcycle, carrying two bodies bound together, became one with the landscape.

In the wide flat of desert, smells provided the first sign of things to come. A dead animal could be smelled long before it was spotted. Bacon on the skillet promised a café where men with cracked skin gathered over coffee in cracked mugs. When talk turned to rumored rain, the voices would lower, either out of reverence or fear of scaring it off.

These were days of struggle, the highway a string held taut between opposing troubles. To the east lay desolate farmlands and cities crushed by economic collapse. To the west lay the relocated desperation of migrating people.

Millions of ragged souls were led not by fire or cloud, but by hunger and hope in the promises of the West. For most, the promises would prove false. The migrants would arrive to dreamed-of opportunities that had evaporated. Grandpa once told me Okies were the Americans hardest hit by the dust bowl and the Depression. Landowners were eager to exploit the endless supply of cheap Okie labor, and Californians hated them for their feral appearances—their bodies carved by starvation and the lack of basic essentials, such as water for bathing. Law keepers feared them because of their sheer numbers.

My great-grandfather prayed for the hungry and the desperate with his fists clenched on handlebars and teeth gritted to keep the dust from his lungs. He knew them well from his years spent preaching in the Oklahoma Panhandle. And they knew him because he had become one of them. He lived at the same level of poverty, raising his family in converted chicken coops and trailers perched on cinder blocks. He preached in several brush-arbor churches on the same day, traveling miles from one to the next, being paid with nothing more than half a bag of vegetables gleaned from the skeletal farms of those who came to hear him.

With his son now tied to him, he sped west. There, desperate people would need to know the same hope he preached in the dust bowl. Though this highway-like life may connect struggle to struggle to struggle, there is a final destination—an eternal life without struggle in a land without dust and death.

When my great-grandfather arrived in California, he would build a church and tell this to anyone who would listen.

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The great deserts of the West—the Mojave, the Sonoran, the Great Basin — funnel travelers into Southern California through a pass between two great mountain ranges. The San Jacinto Mountains to the south and the San Bernardino Mountains to the north rise higher than ten thousand feet and greedily capture any remaining moisture from the Pacific Ocean. The towering ranges ensure that rain does not reach the deserts to the east, where one could die of thirst in sight of mountain peaks covered with snow. The mountains reminded travelers moving through the pass that most of what they hoped for lay just beyond their reach. Many would return home once the great illusion of the West stripped them of all that remained—their dwindling money,...

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Verlag
PRH Christian Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1601429592
ISBN 13 
9781601429599
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland