At age 26, a woman named Cheryl
Strayed set out on a journey. With no experience or training, she began to hike
more than 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert to
Washington State. Walking alone, she experienced hunger and thirst, loneliness
and companionship, terror and pleasure.
As she started out, she made a very
important decision — no fear. “I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me,”
she realized, “my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a
story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from
the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave.
Nothing could vanquish me.”1
Her journey was dangerous, but she
refused to let fear get the upper hand. She wouldn’t accept that she was weak
and cowardly. Instead, she told herself the story that she was strong and
brave. And so she was.
After completing this long and
grueling hike, she wrote the book Wild, which
was later turned into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon. Looking back, Cheryl
Strayed wrote that her life was “like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and
sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it
was, to let it be.”2
A wild trip
In this no-fear decision, there’s a
connection to today’s reading. Soon after foretelling his death, Jesus embarks
on a journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. He knows that this trip will be a wild
one, and that it will end in his death and resurrection. But he makes the same
decision that Cheryl Strayed made — no fear.
Along the way, he instructs his
disciples, engages in debates with his opponents, speaks in parables and heals
the sick. On the roa
...approximately 1,499 words remaining. You are not logged in. Please see options at the top of this page to view complete sermon.
