Wilderness, Adventure, and Risk-Taking with God

Nearly every culture preceding modern American culture had intentional rites of passage moments whereby boys were initiated into manhood, and it usually happened under the shepherding of their fathers and other men in their tribe or community. It varied from culture to culture, but most often, upon returning from initiation, boys became men. Sadly, we’ve lost those essential and formative rituals in our culture and we need to reclaim them. It’s when a boy learns that his life is no longer only about him that he becomes a man, his worldview expands and his service for the benefit of others is awakened.

I agree with Eldredge. He says there is one significant question echoing in the soul of every man. It’s a question that can haunt him and be the source of every insecurity. It’s the question that drives a man into an out-of-balance work life and unhealthy ambition.

What is that question every man needs answered? Do I have what it takes?

Alone in the Mountains

The masculine soul’s deep-seated need to have an answer to that question can be found in the way our Heavenly Father addresses Jesus at his baptism. Do you remember what the Father said to His son? “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”2

Do you see what the Father is doing? He’s meeting the deepest need in the masculine soul of Jesus with this declaration and blessing. He’s saying, “Son, you’re enough. You have what it takes.”

Because of fatherlessness in our culture, including fathers who may be present in the home, yet not actively pursuing the hearts of their children, we have generations of unfathered and uninitiated men still searching for an answer to that question.

If this is you, be encouraged, the words spoken to Jesus are the same for you, as co-heirs with Christ, you’ve been adopted into the family. God smiles on you and declares to his children, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”

But it might surprise you to know that even those who had fathers that spoke blessing and affirmation into their life often still wrestle with that question. So many of us have spent our lives striving, searching, and grasping for an answer. Am I enough? Do I have what it takes? Yes you do, in Christ, you do.

For me, God has used adventure and wilderness to answer that question. It’s almost as if he called me into adventure so he could initiate me as a man and father me as a son.

At first, the wilderness was just another place I turned in my search for validation. You have to understand, I grew up in the rural south, and in our “tribe,” your manhood was proven by what you could do with your hands: on the farm, in the woods, or under the hood of a truck.

But growing up without a father in my everyday life, I wasn’t regularly shown or taught the things other boys are initiated into. It created in me a deep sense of insecurity, especially around any of my peers or other men who could do the things with their hands that I believed any real man should know how to do.

Even to this day, my young adult sons will ask me to show them how to do something they assume I should know how to do, build this or fix that, you know, the things fathers teach their sons. Their requests often unleash all the wrong emotions in me, mostly shame because I don’t know how and can’t show them. It makes me furious at my dad all over again because he wasn’t there, but he could have been.

My entire childhood was defined by abuse and abandonment. A distant relative, over the course of several years, sexually abused me. My dad would leave and come back, leave and comeback, until one day he left and never came back. Abuse and abandonment defined my early life.

While this trauma was raging in my life, there was a show on TV called Grizzly Adams. It was about a man who was unjustly accused of a murder he didn’t commit. He fled to the mountains where he lived alone. His closest friend was a grizzly bear named Ben.

I easily resonated with his injustice and the loneliness he endured.

And even though his wilderness was fictional and made for TV, this is when the mountains and wilderness became an escape for me, a refuge of sorts, from the pain and heartache of my life. I remember thinking, If I could just be like Grizzly Adams and live alone in the mountains, no one could hurt me anymore, and I wouldn’t have to worry about who I could trust. The thrill and familiarity of the wilderness soon saturated my soul. I realized there was something untamed and wild but also beautiful and good “out there” beyond the woods of the little farm I grew up on. There was an allure, a pull, a tug, a craving, a desire for adventure and wilderness that started then, and that I still feel today.

At 12 years old, I was speechless having harvested my first squirrel in the woods with my .410 shotgun. I knew, even then, this wasn’t just about a squirrel, it was something of that validation I was looking for. It was always about more than .410 shotguns, climbing trees, or running through the woods imagining myself as Grizzly Adams. It was a calling and an invitation from my Heavenly Father. God was beckoning me into the wilderness because it’s there he wanted to shepherd my soul from a broken and fearful boy into a man. It’s there he wanted to father and initiate this unfathered and uninitiated boy.

God’s Sovereignty Has Led Me To The Wilderness

Over time, the wilderness stopped being a place I turned to for validation and it actually became my sanctuary, a place where I’ve met with God in unique and life defining ways. When I look back over the storyline of my life, it’s amazing how God has sovereignly used the wilderness to shape me.

On September 9th, 2001, I set out on horseback and rode for two days toward the continental divide in the Colorado Rockies on an elk hunt. The only outside noise polluting the tranquil wilderness sound was jet planes flying over. But as we sat around a campfire late in the evening on September 11th, we talked about how none of us had heard a single plane all day.

Shortly after midnight, a wrangler rode through our camp and told us the news he had received that morning. He said New York had been bombed. America was under attack. I can still feel the somberness and silence as the fire flickered off the aspens, wondering what kind of world I would ride off that mountain and back into.

There was the time in 2004 when God called me on the adventure of a 40-day fast, and in the last week, I found myself in a remote cabin in the wilderness where a greasy truck driver named Dale barged into the cabin and gave me a very personal and direct word of God that still shapes the direction of my life today.

Or I think of 10 years ago and the last conversation I ever had with my father after the hard work of renewing our relationship. We talked on the phone about a wilderness trip to far north remote Canada. Thirty minutes later, he coded in the hospital. I preached his funeral instead of going on the trip. At the funeral my family insisted that I go on. They said he would have wanted me to go. Twenty-four hours later, I met up with my party when a bush plane landed on a lake in remote Canada. I began the process of grief in the silence of the Canadian wilderness.

When Haley and I were wrestling with the decision of following God on the adventure of launching Lonesome Dove Ranch, a ranch we had dreamed of starting for abused and neglected children, we had already planned a trip to Africa for our church. We wanted to investigate the potential of developing another campus for Northplace Church in Durban, South Africa. We took a few extra days and stayed in a thatched roof bungalow in the middle of the African bush (the African wilderness) to seek God’s face and hear his voice. It was there we heard Him say: Trust me. We did, and the ranch just completed its sixth year of serving broken-hearted children.

At key moments, I’ve taken every one of my kids into the wilderness: at 13, at 16, at 18, for graduations, and key “rite of passage” moments. The wilderness has shaped our family.

At nearly every key moment in my life, God’s sovereignty has led me into the wilderness where I’ve celebrated, grieved, interceded, repented and been renewed. The wilderness has become a refuge, a sanctuary, a place of awakening, an altar, and an anvil for me.

And not just for me, it was for Moses, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, and Jesus. The Heavenly Father has long used adventure and wilderness to shape his men.

So why would I want to be dropped in the wilderness of Alaska? Because I’m excited to spend time with my Heavenly Father and let him speak to me, change me, and father me as his son. Because I want to find my heart.

In what I believe is one of the most poignant lines in his book, Wild at Heart, John Eldredge talks about the inward search that drives him to the wilderness. While on an elk hunt in the mountains, he writes,

“That is why I come. And why I linger here still, letting the old bull get away. My hunt, you see, has little to do with elk. I knew that before I came. There is something else I am after, out here in the wild. I am searching for an even more elusive prey... something that can only be found through the help of wilderness. I am searching for my heart.”

Why do I want to do this? Because I’m ready for the quiet. Living in a crazy busy world, with all its expectations and with all the competing voices, I just want to be someplace that makes me feel small and inconsequential.

In a world polluted with technology and a spirituality suffering from hurry, the wilderness is where my heart is recalibrated and the spiritual pollutions that compete with God in my life are extracted. Hurry is replaced with silence and solitude.

Why would I want to do this? Because it’s a test and a challenge. As a man, my masculine heart longs to be called out to see if I have what it takes to rise to the occasion. And I’ve already thought about it. What if I tap out? What if I can’t take it? I decided long ago that I would rather live my life with the regrets of falling short than the regrets of never having tried.

Why do this? Because there’s something primal about it. My feet will walk where few, if any, human feet have ever walked before and it will connect me with the way our ancestors lived.

Why do I do this? Because the sovereignty of my heavenly father is calling me there.

An excerpt from Wilderness, Adventure, and Risk-Taking with God by Bryan Jarrett. Read more in Kinsmen Journal Volume 1.