Many years ago, my brother and I went on a backpacking trip in Washington State. My brother had done many such trips, but this would be my first. I was living in Tennessee at the time and had joined a hiking club that made frequent excursions into the Smoky Mountains. I ‘practiced’ for my backpacking trip by carrying a school backpack filled with water and snacks. I believed I was ready for the more arduous hiking in the North Cascades. But I could not begin to be ready for the 30-pound pack and the relentless switchbacks climbing a thousand feet or more up the backcountry peaks.

There was always something about camping and backpacking that appealed to me. I relished the thought of ‘roughing it’ for a time—forsaking the comforts of my normal life for the extreme deprivation of having to take only what was necessary into the wilderness. Perhaps I saw this kind of activity as a way to expand my own resilience by taking on the additional physical challenge of climbing a spectacular peak with a huge backpack on my back. In reality, the challenge of just getting my tent set up was enough to throw me into fits of whining and complaining. The thin mat I would sleep on barely hid the sharp rocks beneath me, and the constant insect threats revealed that my resilience was almost non-existent. I imagined the comforts of civilization—instant access to a shower, fresh water, and food—as we used a water filter to replenish our water supply from a local stream, ate just what was necessary to sustain us for a few days, and continued our trek without a change of clothes or a shower. If camping and backpacking taught me nothing else, it certainly taught me how much I take for granted in my life, and how easily I wanted to give up at the slightest inconvenience.

That one could choose to pack up the bare necessities in order to backpack or camp seems contradictory to the experience of the almost forty million displaced people worldwide who carry all that is left of their world—literally—on their backs.(1) “Roughing it” takes on a whole new meaning when one’s campsite is a garbage dump in Lebanon, for example. As reported in The Washington Post, “This back end of a junkyard, an acre or so of roughly cleared space, is home to about 50 Syrian refugees who could not find anywhere better to live. Even this garbage-strewn dump looks good compared with the war back home that has destroyed their houses and killed their families.”(2) Here amidst the toxic smell of diesel fuel, rotting garbage and rodents, 50 Syrian refugees ‘rough it’ in this place that would be unimaginable to most of us. Of course, stories like these are repeated around the world with various people groups fleeing oppressive regimes, warring factions, famine, or other forms of hardship in their homelands. For displaced people, their choice to live in deplorable conditions is a choice between life and death.

Of the many stories told in the pages of the Bible, one of the consistent narratives is that of wandering, of displacement and exile, and of being ‘strangers’ in foreign lands. The Israelites, a nation founded by a nomad named Abraham, spent forty years wandering in the desert of Sinai. Even the holy place of God—the Ark of the Covenant and the Tent of Meeting—was meant to be portable. The very presence of God traveled with the wandering Israelites, as part of their necessary tabernacling in the wilds of the Sinai.

Interestingly, their status as sojourners and strangers became a crucial identity marker once they did come to a place called home. They were to live in light of their history as wanderers, as strangers and aliens. Since they had been aliens and sojourners themselves, they were commanded to remember and treat others in the same position in ways that demonstrated grace, hospitality, and provision.(3) Indeed, this God of the wanderers and refugees declares that he is the one “who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall love the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Later on in Israel’s history, Jesus would say that the ‘Son of Man has no place to lay his head’ and that those who welcomed the stranger in fact had welcomed him. As the leader of the early Christians, the apostle Paul declared that the mark of a true follower of Jesus was to extend hospitality to strangers.(4) It is hard to imagine: God himself becoming homeless, taking on the role of stranger and alien in a foreign land, so that he might come near enough to reach us with the hospitable grace of God.

I cannot help but remember this overarching narrative in the Bible whenever I have camped. No matter where I have landed on the trail, or around the country, there has been a hand to help by offering food, a better trail to take, or simply help in setting up camp. Just the other day at our comparably deluxe KOA campsite, a kind man offered my husband and me an additional pork chop—he had too many and would we like to have some—a total stranger offering food to other fellow strangers. Yes, we often choose to rough it in all sorts of ways, but for those whose life is rough will we find the same resilience and strength to reach out and lend a hand?

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Global Figures 1989-2014, Internal-displacement.org, accessed August 7, 2016.

(2) Kevin Sullivan “Scraps of Life” The Washington Post, December 2, 2013, accessed 8/7/2016.

(3) See for example: Exodus 22:21, Leviticus 19:33-34 24:22; Deuteronomy 6:10-13.

(4) See Luke 9:58; Matthew 8:20; Matthew 25:31-46; Romans 12:13.

 

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