Everything that Hinders
A friend recently told me about a cave system in Montana and a group of his friends who had made a significant discovery. As a teenager, I had wandered through the edges of these caves on a backpacking trip and witnessed their vastness and inner isolation, which made the story particularly interesting to me. Evidence suggested these caves connected with other systems, but there were no passages large enough for an expedition to fit through, leaving much of the vast routes unknown.
One group, however, spent years mapping, planning, and spelunking, hoping to find the deepest known routing into the cave. Often spending days and nights camping under the mountain, the group would return home exhausted only to return and explore again. It was this habit of persistence that led to their discovery.
It all came down to one narrow channel. They bellycrawled for miles as the cave funneled into an opening so small that they had to strip down to their underwear to pass through. Muddy and cold, they were ready to turn back. They saw what they thought might be the final closure of a route that led to another dead end. However, it was something else. The cave opened into the largest inner room of any cave discovered in the lower 48 states. It was a cold cathedral sitting in darkness, hidden under the mountain.
In telling this story, I’m thinking of the relationship that we have to our possessions and how what we possess often keeps us from finding a hidden and sacred space within ourselves. In our lives, there will be chutes so narrow that there will be no room for anything but ourselves.
Like the half-naked cavers, we might have to leave behind anything that hinders us in our journey. Our wealth or even our ideals may be too cumbersome to pass through the gates of true transformation. As the scripture says, “For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20b). His great mystery is calling us to go deeper into the intricacies of his hidden kingdom but to do that, we must first turn inward and find the empty cathedral in our hearts that’s reserved for Christ alone.
Many of us never find this hidden cathedral because we are striving toward conquest and accumulation. We keep looking for ways to make more money and own more things as we try to fill the sacred space that lies empty within us.
As it says in Hebrews Chapter 12, “let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”
Here’s another story that comes to mind when I think about how our possessions keep us from finding our true selves.
In 1859, a ship called The Royal Charter was returning from Melbourne, Australia, to Liverpool, filled with English gold miners coming home with a considerable amount of wealth. To keep their treasure safe, many of the miners sewed their gold nuggets into the fabric of their clothes so that no one would steal them while they slept. Many also had their gold turned into heavy belts, which they wore around their waists and arms.
Tragically, the Royal Charter sank soon after departure killing almost everyone on board. A shipwreck that could have been survivable turned catastrophic because each man drowned, weighed down with the gold that they carried.
The question I want to ask is this: Are your possessions possessing you? Are you weighed down with the things that you’re holding?
As the poet David Whyte says in his poem Sweet Darkness, “You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in.”
Are you free?
Are you free enough to pursue God’s kingdom in the world? Or are you hindered and weighed down by the things you’ve accumulated?
-Marshall McLean