  In 2002 I was having a crisis of faith of sorts. That summer represented the end of my one-year internship working with Campus Crusade for Christ. Prior to that job I had been involved with the organization as an undergraduate. In many ways, the organization had been quite instrumental in my spiritual growth.
They had provided me with fellowship—friends who loved Jesus, something that seemed rare at a large university like UW-Madison. They imparted to me a desire to study the Bible, and motivated me to share the good news with others. Despite these blessings they had also led me into a faith that was mostly rooted in a rational, calculated, non-relational, overly simplistic modern worldview.
It was that summer, in Alaska, that this modern worldview was finally exposed. Leading up to that summer I had been experiencing what I thought was a dark night of the soul, and perhaps it was. Since I had been first introduced to Crusade I had always had my doubts, but that year I found that the “answers” I had been taught were simply unhelpful tips from the evangelical party-line. I found myself in the midst of reading through the four spiritual laws with students and trying just as hard to convince myself that the gospel was true. In February the temperatures dropped well below zero and an impersonal darkness crept into town. I found it nearly impossible to pray, and my roommate, Tony, said that I was waking him at ungodly hours with the cries of my “night terrors”.
Three months later, in the first week of June, I found myself on a plane headed for my summer staff assignment in Anchorage. For the duration of the six and a half hour flight I feared that if the staff team found out about my spiritual state I would be on the same flight the next day headed in the opposite direction. A week later I found myself living in Alaska with five undergraduate students who were looking to me for spiritual direction.
For five weeks I was a Jacob wrestling with my God. I was surrounded by His creation, but I was not sure who He had created me to be or who He was. I sensed I was on the cusp of a spiritual breakthrough. There were two possibilities: either I was discarding a fake plastic God for a living Creator or I was close to agnosticism. One way or the other, I knew I was close to a significant spiritual change. The night before I was to return to Minneapolis my co-worker, Matt Koschmann, invited me to climb the highest peak in Anchorage.
With only hours left in the land of the midnight sun and uncertainty concerning when I might next return, it was an invitation that I could not resist. The two of us arrived at the trailhead of Mt. O’Malley one hour past midnight, just as the sun entered its three hour Alaskan siesta—its afterglow illuminating our path as brightly as a neighbourhood streetlamp. The journey was three hours up and just over two hours down, and my plane was departing for home in less than eight hours.
We had to climb quickly. As we inched toward our goal—the highest overlook in the city—we huffed out conversation between large gasps of thick air. Much of our ascending dialogue centered on my spiritual doubts and fears. Matt was a friend that I trusted, and there was little that I left unsaid. He listened compassionately, offering me encouragement in the form of Snickers bars along the way.
As we neared O’Malley’s peak our verbal communication became a silent co-pilgrimage—two friends on a shared journey. At the peak we stood in silent awe as the sun awoke from its short nap. As the light in the sky began to reveal the life in the valley my existential angst became humble admiration. God had created all this unexplainable beauty! He was God, and I was not. Upon our descent I could think of nothing but placing my next step on stable ground. I had just experienced a major moment in my spiritual journey, but it had gone mostly unnoticed. The descent was nothing more than a race to the airport. Nine months later I found myself at my journal.
As I began to write about this experience I had in mind that I would write about what had been nothing more than an ordinary hike—an adventurous risk we take in our youth. But as I wrote, the unseen meaning of that evening began to appear. I quickly realized that it had been much more than a hike. That morning God had shown me that He is not a god of zeros and ones. He is not a being that I can dissect and examine with rational logic.
He is the living God, a friend whose love is knowable, but whose being is incomprehensible. He is the creator and redeemer. He is a lamp unto my feet. 
