I was standing with several other pastors a while back, waiting for a funeral to begin, when one of them asked, "Do you remember what God said as the Israelites were about to enter the promised land?"

I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, so he continued. "He told them it would be a land of hills and valleys." It was a perfect word for the moment. In this life there are hills and valleys, mountain-top highs and deep-valley lows. That particular moment was a low one for the family involved.

The passage he meant was Deuteronomy 11:10-11. "The land you are entering to take over is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you planted your seed and irrigated it by foot as in a vegetable garden. But the land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven. It is a land the LORD your God cares for..."*

Since that day I’ve thought about these words a lot. How true it is that the land we call our lives has mountains and valleys. There are good times and there are bad times, ups and downs. This has been my experience, and I suspect yours, too.

I think back to the different valleys I have walked. In one dark valley, I scoured the papers looking for something, anything, that might be better than being in ministry. In another, Jan struggled with post-partum depression. The deepest of the valleys had swamps too grimy and black to mention. At those times I cried out to God, wondering why this new land could be so difficult.

So many people have the same kinds of experiences, only different, if that makes sense. Kind of like the two school boys comparing lunches. One boy looks into his lunch sack and says, "I’ve got a chicken salad sandwich, an orange, and two chocolate chip cookies." Another boys looks into his bag, and says, "That’s exactly like my lunch, except I have a tuna sandwich, an apple, and a cupcake." We have different experiences but we go through the same things. Same but different.

When we experience ups and downs, we sometimes think that it would be better to live on the plain. Easy farming. No ups and downs. Life on the plain seems simpler. But look more closely at our passage. The plain in Egypt was "where you planted your seed and irrigated it by foot as in a vegetable garden." Sure, the soil was soft, but it had to be irrigated. To make the land usable, the Hebrew slaves worked and toiled to dig irrigation canals and to pump the water which kept the desert back. The cost of productivity was the sweat of their brow and the lash of the whip on their backs.

I lived on the plains for a long time. I called myself "even-keeled." "Even-keeled" isn’t bad if it means stable and predictable, but it isn’t good if it means I don’t want to feel anything. In college my hero was Spock from the original Star Trek - all mind, no feelings. Anything to avoid feeling. In my warped way of thinking, to feel joy was to invite disappointment. No ups, no downs. I was living on the plains, but the cost was life itself.

"The land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of...drinks rain from heaven. It is a land the LORD your God cares for." God invites you and me to go into a better place with him.

Pause to wipe my eyes. I’m watching a CBC interview with Jan Arden. In it she describes a desperately sick man who wrote to tell her how a much her cd meant to him. He crawled down the stairs to get the Amazon delivery and took 2 hours to get back to his apartment, just so he could listen to her. Her tears touch me as I remember what someone said to me yesterday after church, and I feel the joy of knowing that God has used me to do something good.

There is still a part of me that wants to go back to the plain. It cries out, "Tears are silly and foolish." "You're only setting yourself up for disappointment." However, the part of me that wants to go with God just feels so good. Much better than warm fuzzies. This is joy and life I feel, the sweet rain from heaven rather than the stagnant canal water I used to pump all day.

The invitation to go with God means that I can’t stay where I am. The promised land with its sweet rain is in the hills ahead of me, not on the plain behind me. I feel the foothills under my feet, and so I step out, one toe after the other, stretching into baby steps, and lengthening my stride each day until I’m running because I know there is life ahead with God.

Hope this helps,

Troy

ON FIRE is a weekly letter of encouragement by Troy Dennis. This letter published April 18, 2005.