Hey my name is Matt I’m with Project Forty and I just want to share a quick story with you today. Let’s go back to the year 2003. I was a mountain guide and I had a group in the coastal range of British Columbia and we were on a route called One Eye. There was a glacier crossing on day three. This thing is a massive sheet of ice, it’s full crevasses, which are just big holes in the ice. So you’re walking, but you could fall through what seems like solid snow and instead it’s this giant hole. A bit of a scary spooky little thing but it’s adventurous and I love adventure. So we had 18 people which is a massive number of people for a trip, but we had a plan. Me and my co-guides went out in the morning and scoped it out.
We had Plan A: Walk across the glacier. Be roped up. The crevasses seem small enough that if someone fell in they might get stuck maybe 10 feet down, which decided would not be the end of the world and this option had the least risk of injury.
We had Plan B: Get off the ice and into the rocks and boulders that were at the base of this massive solid rock wall next to the glacier. I would say this wall is about a thousand feet tall. We thought we’d be safe and it sounded good.
We chose Plan A: We get going and as we’re weaving around these crevasses on five different rope teams, we come across this hole in the glacier. It was summer and this section of the glacier was melting out. So there were little streams of water flowing, but as they ran across the surface, the streams would flow into bigger streams and the bigger streams were going into these holes.
At the bottom of the hole all I could hear was raging water, like a massive river underneath this glacier. It scared the snot out of me. If someone went down that hole, they’re done. So we could get a little bit lost weaving around these crevasses as they got larger. So it was time to go to Plan B. We needed to head to the safety of the rock field.
We get there and I notice, getting up on my tippy toes and I see a dark spot in the rocks. I get a little bit closer and I realize that the rocks were on top of snow, which had massive holes in it and there’s a raging river below that!
So Plan B not safe, we cancelled it altogether. We were in a really precarious spot.
You’ll need to listen to future blogs to hear the rest of that story, but you know, it reminds me–if you’ve read the Bible at all, you’ve probably heard the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in the garden. Deception happens. What seemed to be truth, the devil turned it, just tweaked it a little bit. He took something that seemed very solid to stand on, a simple rule, “You can’t eat from this tree,” and he tweaked it. He said, “Did God really say that?” I just want to encourage us today because there’s a lot of things happening around the world, a lot of people say a lot of things, but we have take responsibility to open up the Word of God, to read it, to know it ourselves. We must show ourselves approved so that we won’t be deceived as we walk through this world and everything it throws at us.
So stand firm, stand fast in God’s word, and I hope that you’re encouraged today through this story.
-Matt