Learning about God's all-sufficient grace and true spiritual rest.

In December 2005, my family and I went on a short holiday to Hokkaido in Japan. One of the highlights of the trip was to be a short stay in a ski resort, where we would try our hand at skiing. There were some skiing lessons to attend at Snow City prior to the trip, but being busy with work, I opted to skip the lessons and decided that I would simply read up on "how to ski" from the internet. Duh.

When we finally found ourselves on the snow just outside our hotel, I found that the theory I had picked up worked great. I was gliding along smoothly and keeping my balance. Piece of cake. Good thing we had not bothered to sign up with a ski instructor, I thought. That would have been a waste of money. My two young kids, being fast learners, were eager for more, so we queued up at a ski lift to bring us up the slope. Looking back, I remember seeing very seasoned skiers wearing aerodynamic suits queuing up with us, but it did not strike me at that point in time that I should be a little worried about this.

We clumsily scrambled onto the ski lift and were off! After a few minutes, I realised that we were going up pretty high, with no station in sight. Another ten to twenty minutes of anxiety ensued (I lost track of time), until a station loomed into view. When we reached it, we jumped off the ski lift into what seemed like a very cold blizzard.

I can still see my children in my mind's eye, poised at the edge of the cliff with the mountains in the distant background, snow whipping all around. They were looking back at me and asking permission to go ahead. Against my better judgement (and after a very fervent, quick prayer) I said yes.

I think we didn't get more than a hundred metres before we fell. It seems that gliding on a flat surface is very different from gliding down a ski slope. I decided to turn back, and it took us the better part of an hour to clamber up the slope and back to the station where I begged and pleaded with the operator to let us take the ski lift down. It was not possible.

I don't understand how I could have made the near-suicidal decision to go down the slope again, but I did (there being basically no other choice). I figured that at the worst we could slide all the way down on our backsides. Wrong again. This time I ploughed full speed into my son who had gone ahead and fallen in the snow. He screamed in pain and cried that he could not move his legs. I had crashed to a halt a little lower down the slope, and had to crawl up to him as he screamed and asked me why I was trying to kill him. It was like a scene from a soap opera, except it was real. I genuinely thought I had paralyzed him for life, and cried out to God that this would not be the case. Oh God, No! As it turned out, his skis had gotten stuck in the snow. A quick check proved that he could feel his legs, and could move them as soon as we had unbuckled the skis. I breathed a quick word of thanks to God.

I moved the children to the side of the ski slope, and flagged down a passing skier to ask for help. He was Japanese, but by God's grace, he spoke fluent English (you know how hard it is to find someone who speaks English in Japan?), and I was able to explain to him what happened. He promised he would get help.

We huddled together there in the snow, and I was seriously beginning to wonder if we would freeze to death before help came, as my kids were beginning to shiver quite badly. We prayed together and expressed our trust that God would help us, and sang songs of praise to keep our spirits up.

Thank God, after about half an hour, a man turned up on a pair of skis, with a radio and a first aid pack. I was puzzled. Where was the snowmobile or helicopter to get us out of here? He asked which of us was injured. I find it hard to describe the look on his face when it slowly became clear to him that no one was injured, and that we simply did not know how to ski and needed help to get down from the mountain. There was a long exchange of conversation with someone else on the radio (with lots of disbelief expressed, I'm sure), then he smiled and indicated that we should wait for further help.

Another man turned up shortly, with something that looked like a little metal boat steered by a couple of poles held by the skier. It was a snow stretcher of some sort. The kids and their ski equipment were loaded on board and tied down. I was beginning to wonder if I would be expected to ski down on my own, when to my great relief, another similar stretcher appeared.

They made me unbuckle all my equipment and lie down in the stretcher, then asked me to fold my arms across my chest before bundling me up and tying me down securely with a sheet of canvas and some rope. I felt completely helpless, like I was being prepared for burial. I was told not to do anything except to lie back and relax, and I would be brought to safety. We started off down the slope, and as we gathered speed, I finally began to relax, realizing I could fully trust the expert skier who was guiding my stretcher back to the safety of the hotel.

On the long trip down the slope, everything clicked. I knew why this had happened, and that I had to write about it. For months, I had been pondering Peter's exhortation to "Grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." (2 Peter 3:18). What does it mean to grow in grace? What exactly is grace, and how do we grow in it?

This was God showing me what His grace is all about. My feeble efforts in my own strength to live up to God's standard, to please Him and earn my salvation, all lie in the dust. In His mercy, He has done everything necessary for salvation. In fact He demands that I lay all else down and trust only in Him for everything necessary for salvation. I am to be as one dead, lying helpless and trusting fully in the one and only Person who can carry me to heaven. And I am to continue growing in this frame of mind, trusting more and more in Christ from day to day, and less in less in myself.

So then there remains a rest to the people of God. For he who has entered into his rest, he also has ceased from his own works, as God did from His. - Heb 4:9,10

The writer to the Hebrews refers to this laying aside of our own works. The only way to enter this rest is to believe in Jesus Christ, leaning our entire weight on Him, so to speak, knowing that He will carry us through. You only lean your entire weight on a person if you trust that He is not only strong enough but entirely willing to bear your weight.

I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I've committed unto Him against that day. - 2 Tim 1:12

You know what was the best part? I had been prepared to pay a stiff fee for "activating" the ski patrol, but I found out when I checked out of the hotel that this was a totally free service! And that, indeed, completes the analogy, doesn't it?