Little Vegas

I’m laying on my twenty five dollar bed. That’s half of the price I split for this small, yet luxorious room. My bed is a single that I paid for for a night in the Holiday Inn in Gatlinburg, Tennesssee. My friend Ben and I decided to stay a night in the city that most consider as the “Tourist Trap of Tennessee.” I prefer to call it “little Vegas.” Gatlinburg is carved into a valley between two major hills, according to the locals, even though they aren’t very tall, they are called mountains not hills. There is one main street that splits one side of the city from the other. Millions of little twinkling lights fill the city as if Clark Griswold decorated it. Souveneir shops, candy stores, and eateries are squeezed into the smallest possible space in order for their name to be seen as the thousands of people walk the strip each day. Fun lines every corner and there is never enough money and time to experience everything in one trip.
But tonight, I’m not outside with the glow of lights against my face or in the middle of the thousands that came to see the extravagent city. Rather, I’m warm in my twenty five dollar bed with my good friend to my right and my Dalmatian, Eli, at my feet asleep.
Let me tell you a little about Ben. First off, he is a great guy. Very understanding, athletic, and willing to help a guy whenever he asks for it. His stature is pretty massive. He’s built like Lurch from the series, The Munsters, and I believe somebody actually gave him that nickname sometime in high school. He is a little lower than the heavens, about 6’ 5” to be exact. Very strong body, not someone I’d say the wrong thing to. At first glance, you would figure he was clumsly, not athletic, and never knew what a razor was. I glance over at him, only to notice my eyes hanging low as my mind wonders wild. I can only imagine the views my eyes will see as we hike tomorrow, and especially, the pain my body will endure. The beauty God lays on my eyes will make me only wish and want more.
As time passes in this hotel, Ben and I only inch closer and closer toward the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains. We are like two twins counting down to their birthday. I absolutely love the mountains. Every aspect of them brings me much worry and pleasure. They can be terrifying, because of their great mass, their power, and their mysteriousness. Within their beauty and dangerousness, they have claimed the lives of Indians, early settlers, and adventurers; many hoping for a better life and a more stable future. Some were even killed to escape a brutal past, or a soul itching to catch a beautiful view on a vista. This country of mountains can be suffocating to one’s life, especially to those who don’t respect it.
Metaphorically, I plan to be one of these people. I hope that she kills a piece of me while I adventure her hills, trails, crevices, streams, and trees; I wish to leave a little piece of me there when I leave. A piece that is tearing my mind into thousands of pieces, a small piece that is terrorizing me. This terror is my future. “Woah!” You might say. “How can you leave the future in the past?” I’m not literally doing so. I’m trying to depart from the questions like: What does God have planned for me? Where will I be in one year? Ten years?
The constant, agonizing questions that fill my feeble and lonesome mind. I pray God will help me in this adventure, to bring my life before my eyes to show me how I can be a better servant for Him, a more faithful Christian. A new year just began, and I plan to glorify God greater than I ever have before. This trip is a trip to find my true self. This is a trip of the verse Matthew 7:7…

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“We were made to do this--not to sit in a mental or spiritual cave. Man’s destiny is to strive, to seek, and to find, and not to yield.” -Tristan Jones ( Adventurist)

I was made for this trip, a search for a deeper part of my soul that has been recently lost due to a less than Christian life. This trip is an asking, a seeking, and a knocking for God to be more developed in my life, for me to be more devoted to my Father in Heaven.
This adventure is a desire to forget past problems, to erase them from my life like Grace given to the sinner by God. God, with His grace, will cleanse my spirit, with His beautiful paint strokes upon His earth; He will show me the man He is perpetually making, the man He loves, and the greater man within myself that is needed. This escape from reality is a salvation that I’m in great need of. As a Christian, as a sinner, I am searching for only God knows what. I feel Him constantly touching my soul, and I believe He is telling me I am in need of this trip. He is leading me to this place where I know He will show me where I’m traveling in life, where I will soon discover a little piece of the person He desires for me to be.
I will make sure that I will be a personification of Matthew 7:7. I will pray, and not yield, for God to show me more, allow me to become a greater person, better Christian, a more loving individual. The verse I will continue to meditate on is Matthew 7:7...”If you ask, you will be given what you ask for. If you seek, you will find. And if you knock, it will be opened to you.”

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A little shift here. I wrote the past five and a half pages before my trip as you can tell from the great anticipation I had. The pages developed from little ideas I wrote down in a journal. From here on, I am writing in a somewhat past tense, because the trip is over, it has been finished. God has revealed Matthew to me.
The morning after our hotel stay in ‘Little Vegas,’ Ben and I loaded up the Jeep and headed thirty miles Southeast for our adventure. We finally found the Ranger Station where we were supposed to park and leave the vehicle for the amount of time that we would hike. We grabbed the backpacks from the rear of the Jeep, and not until then did we really become aware of the massive weight that would be on our backs for miles upon miles throughout the days to come. We walked one hundred feet to Chestnut Branch Trail, this is the trail that would lead us to the Appalachian Trail. In the fifty steps to the Chestnut Branch Trail, I started to realize the pain that was already shocking my body. My lower back and legs were heating up only to remind myself that I’m human. I was thinking, “Oh great! I haven’t even started the hike and my body is already aching!” As soon as we reached Chestnut Branch Trail, I said a prayer for God to deliver to Ben and me the strength to endure this journey. Matthew 7:7 constantly rang in my head. I made sure I was aware and waiting patiently for God to reveal His plans for me.
We hiked an agonizing two miles up Chestnut Branch Trail. My body has never felt or been exposed to such a challenging time in my life. I’ve been a pretty athletic guy all my life but this two mile climb, not hike but a climb, straight up was very testing, emotionally and physically. As much complaining as I’m doing, I’ll be honest: I loved it! We were in the middle of God’s country, as if we were within the vicinity of Eden and living like a couple of Davy Crocketts. Finally, we made it to Appalachian Trail. We dropped, or should I say threw, our packs to the ground to rest muscles we had never known we had. A little water and a tree stump made the perfect rest stop.
Ben said exaustingly, “I hope the Appalachian Trail isn’t as bad as what we just came up.” I nodded my head in agreement as a sucked water from my camelback.
I told him, “Even though that trip was hard, I think it was worth every step. We saw so many beautiful views.”
He laughed and said, “Yeah, but those steps hurt!”
I chuckled as a pushed this sentence my lungs, “Yeah, wait till tomorrow, the steps will really be hurting.”
He answered, “Yep they will,” knowing about the imminent pain.
We sat around for ten minutes more and decided to pick up our packs and head down the long-awaited Trail. We started the A.T. noticing that this Trail was much easier, less inclined, and overall, better for our bodies. We weaved around the sides of mountains, only resting once every two to three miles. We would grab a snack for energy, a little water to wet our dry mouths, take a few pictures, record the views on a camcorder, and then we’d pick up and go further down the Trail.
Not expecting a sudden change in direction, Ben and I managed to somewhat get lost along the way. The Trail is distinct, and there are abundant white markers on trees to guide the hiker throughout the A.T.. But we followed the Trail, only to find ourselves at a dead end. We followed the markers to the edge of nature which led to a paved road. We completely stepped out of God’s beauty and back into man-made reality. We looked around, searching for another marker but there wasn’t one. So we decided to backtrack to a place we thought would be great for our tent to stay the night, and we’d figure things out in the morning. We set up camp and made supper, finding ourselves exausted and starving from the intense exercise.
We ate our Cambell’s soup and hopped in the tent. We snuggled ourselves in our sleeping bags to take a little nap as the sun was descending past the mountain, leaving us in the cool valley for the night.
After an hour of rest, I sat up in my sleeping bag with a terrible pain in my stomach. The thoughts of me in the wilderness without medicine truly terrified me.
Ben sat up and looked at me as I cringed in pain. He asked, “What’s the matter?” in a raspy, morning voice tone.
I answered, “I have this terrible pain in my stomach and I’m not sure what to do about it.”
He laid back down, keeping his eyes open and talking to me about the situation. The feeling I had was nauseating, and I wondered if the pain would ebb. It became stronger and worry began to fill my mind. I kept asking myself, “What should I do? We already have camp set up for the night, and it might be too dark to hike back to the vehicle.”
The day’s hike, according to the map, was pretty much three-quarters of a circle. The road we ran into once we got lost was the main road we came through in order to park at the Ranger Station. So, we hiked ten miles to where we were, and we knew we were only two miles from the Ranger Station. So this information for me was a plus in a negative circumstance. I knew if I left, I wouldn’t have to hike ten miles back, but rather, just two miles down the paved road to the Jeep.
The pain became unbearable. I told Ben to start packing everything, and that we were heading down the road to the Jeep, and then we would drive ten miles to the nearest town for some medicine. He politely agreed, and asked if we were going to take down the tent. I told him that we would leave it for the night and come tomorrow to get it. So we gathered all of our things (in the dark), I clipped Eli’s leash to his harness, and we started looking for the trail markers on the nearest trees. After a couple of minutes we found one. Once on the path, I had absolutely no clue where I was going. I knew the general direction to the road, but I wasn’t certain if we were walking on the path or not. Eli, thank God, was our guide and leader. I’ve seen a few unbelievable things in my life, and this act only added to the list. He was using his nose to steer Ben and me down the Trail to the road. There was only one trail that led to the road, and he knew the path with ease. He had his head down, only sniffing the dark yet invisible route that laid before all three of us. Thankfully, because of Eli and God, they led us out of the Trail safely onto the road.
I bought my medicine in the nearest town and came to the decision that we should probably stay the night in a hotel. Which was a great choice because I was still in pain, and the temperatures, which we didn’t know at the time, were supposed to drop into the high twenties. We checked into the hotel, watched the much anticipated and dissapointing National Championship Game. Florida beat Ohio State 41-14.
I apologized to Ben for what happened in the past couple of hours. He laughed and said, “Man, you can’t do anything about that. We can’t help getting sick in this world.”
“I know,” I agreed, “but I had this whole trip built up and it literally blew up in our faces.”
He understandingly answered, “I promise you man, it’s fine. We can’t control situations such as these. They just happen.”
Ben is right. But there was a reason I started feeling sick. I believe God placed that feeling within my stomach, as a warning for something, or possibly to show that He is the One in charge of this adventure called life, and not me.
We ended up waking the next morning, going to the Trail to get the tent, and traveling back to Murfreesboro. I still felt somewhat sick, and I wasn’t attempting to push myself further up the Trail. That was it. It was a very shortened trip of two days, which was planned to be six. But as each minute passes since the trip, I unravel a new lesson God has taught me and continues to instruct me about.
I thought to myself, “What if that was all I was supposed to experience? What if the trip was only supposed to be a couple of days long? Even though I asked God to instruct me, teach me, and present my future in a way I could understand while on the trip, therefore, in my mind, I expected God to show me these things on the trip, but He was presenting them to me outside the trip. He led me away from what my ideal place to find God would be, and said, ‘Hey, you can find Me anywhere you are! You don’t have to travel 400 miles, camp in a beautiful place I created, and expect Me to speak to you about the Truth! I am here, there, and everywhere you go. Wherever you are, I am there too!’”
This knowledge that God was giving me was mind blowing. It was absolutely idiotic for me to even think that I needed 40 pounds of food and clothes on my back, hike twelve to thirteen miles a day with torturing pain in order for God to explain His plans to me. As Homer Simpson would say, “DOH!”
As I continue to dig deep and listen to the lessons God taught and is teaching me since the trip, I have found within these revelations that the answers are incessant; they literally will not stop flowing into my mind and spirit.
Here’s another revelation: Remember that feeling I had in my stomach? Well, I think it was placed there by God. He was telling me to get up, buy some medicine, and watch Ohio State get raped by Florida. Even though this didn’t sound as fun to me as staying within Nature, I had to leave; the longer I sat in that tent, the more intense the pain became. At each second guess of staying, it was as if God was throwing punches into my abdomen.
While on the trip back to Murfreesboro, Ben and I heard on the radio that Southeast Tennessee, which was the area we were hiking in, was expecting many inches of snow and plummeting temperatures. A few drastic changes in the weather had occurred since I watched the weather the day before we left for the big trip. Maybe God was also telling me, “Hey, I’m fixing to make it cold, so you better get your butt outta here! You can’t stay here any longer!” Maybe God did initiate the ache, only He knows, huh?
Continuing on with my prayer of Matthew 7:7. I understand that I made this trip to be a search and discovery of this verse. What can I say besides I’m human? I did what everyone else does; you know…make your own plans, run your own life, those sorts of things. One aspect I should have changed, is the fact that I can’t run my life without God. He has more input than me. But I guess I thought I could outwit God, you know, truly be more clever than Him. I would have been better off trying to explain to Einstein that he had this whole idea of Relativity wrong.
I also comprehend the fact that I did have my prayer answered. I did find out my future, but God didn’t give me the power to see fourteen days ahead, which would be awesome. God only presents the now to me, and I must take this information and create the best decision possible, with Him always being included in the choice. The Matthew 7:7 prayer was answered, yet in a much different way that I imagined. But isn’t this the way most prayers are answered?