The Greenville News (SC) carried this article about two former students of mine. They are taking off six months to hike the Appalachian Trail. I ate lunch with Joel’s dad yesterday. He’s going to help me connect with them once they make into Pennsylvania. The plan is to give them a couple night’s rest in our home.

Radical steps: Appalachian Trail hike is trip of a lifetime for Greenville couple
Published: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 - 6:00 am

By Mike Foley STAFF WRITER (mfoley@greenvillenews.com)

When is it a good time to quit your job? To move out of your apartment? Cancel phone service, leave friends and family behind, and not worry about anything except the simple task of daily living? Oh yeah, and travel 2,175 miles, step by step by step. Jessica and Joel Koontz decided the time is now. “If we’re going to do something radical,” said Joel, looking at his wife of 20 months for a nod of acquiescence two days before they left to through-hike the Appalachian Trail, “we have to do it now.”
It’s an awesome task the Greenville residents set for themselves. Jessica and Joel — 23 and 25, respectively — figure the trail will give them time to think, a chance to plan their young lives, to become closer to God, prepare them for whatever life may hold and offer a physical challenge.
“At first, I had no desire to do the Appalachian Trail,” Jessica said. “I wanted to take a trip to Europe.”

When they measured costs — and figured six months of hiking would cost about the same as one month overseas — Jessica warmed to the idea. Her fate was sealed when a good friend of the couple’s sat them down and told them about his own through-hike on the epic trail.

It helped a little when the two won an essay contest to field test new backpacks for outdoors gear company Mountain Hardware. That earned them $800 in gear. It also helped when they found someone to sublet their apartment.

“The way this has all fallen together has been remarkable,” Joel said. “From winning backpacks, to subletting our apartment and being able to leave our furniture there, it’s been pretty obvious to us that this is what we’re supposed to be doing.”

That just left quitting their jobs, getting in shape, buying about $2,000 more in gear, planning a six-month trek through the wilderness and oh yeah, gaining weight.

Since many people lose weight along the trail due to the number of calories burned every day and because you have to carry all the food you’ll eat on your back, trail veterans advised them to gain weight before they left.

Ice cream and super-sized meals became their best friends.

Probably most important, they began to mentally prepare.

“We thought this was going to be a very isolated trip,” Jessica said. “But when we started to learn more about the trail, we saw how social it is.”

They started the trip June 3, doing the southward route from the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail at Mount Katahdin in Maine toward the southern exit at Spring Mountain, Ga. Along the way they’ll pass through 14 states, taking about 5 million steps.

They’ll encounter both extreme wilderness and many small towns that cater to hikers along the nation’s longest marked footpath.

In these small cities and towns, they can pick up provisions they’ve arranged to be mailed to them, including goodies from Starbucks, Joel’s former employer, and Great Harvest Bread Company, where Jessica worked.

They’re taking few luxuries, measuring every ounce of what they’ll carry to make the lightest load possible and even cutting their toothbrushes in half. Joel’s filled pack weighs in at slightly more than 19 pounds; Jessica’s is three pounds lighter. But that doesn’t count food and water.

“It will get lighter as we go,” Joel explained, saying they need some warmer clothes for the first 200-plus miles in Maine where temperatures can dip below freezing, even during the summer. Still, they’ve taken a few luxuries.

Joel’s taking along a French press to help feed his coffee addiction and a thick copy of “A Confederacy of Dunces” to read, while Jessica insisted on bringing a large supply of gel hand sanitizer.

Another luxury is two scheduled breaks along the way, one for a wedding just two weeks into their hike and another for a family reunion in August.

In the end, though — which they expect will come just before Thanksgiving — they want a chance to live simply, to focus on just being.

“We’re both trusting God that it will be a good trip,” Joel said. “If it’s not, we’ll learn from that, and we’ll learn a lot about ourselves.”

While neither is an exceptionally experienced backpacker, they trust themselves.

“The only thing I’m afraid of is things not under our control like an injury,” Jessica said. “We have too much pride to quit.”

We fly out of Chicago for Shanghai on Monday with 13 college students (12 from BBC; 1 from Houghton College). Our purpose is to visit orphans in Fuzhou, Jiangxi, China. You can learn a little about Fuzhou here. Here’s the orphanage where we will be serving. This link has more info about the orphanage. You’ll find a number of pics by a couple that recently adopted a little girl from there.

Time to close the LOTR poll. The results were, for the most part, what I expected. There were only two that I did not expect, namely, the number of votes that Legolas and Gollum received respectively. Take a look:

#1 - Aragorn: 80 votes
#2 - Gandalf - 49 votes
#3 - Frodo & Sam - 39 votes each
#4 - Gollum - 37 votes
#5 - Legolas - 28 votes

What do you think accounts for Gollum receiving more votes than Legolas? (Obviously, not many teenage women read this blog…) How is it that Gollum was only 2 votes outside of 3rd place. Why do you think a number of people considered Gollum to be one of their favorite LOTR characters? It can’t be due to his looks or personality. Thoughts?

All of the poll results are below:

“Christians who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons-much less secure than non-Christians, because they have too much light to rest easily under the constant bulletins they receive from their Christian environment about the holiness of God and the righteousness they are supposed to have. Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce defensive assertion of their own righteousness and defensive criticism of others. They come naturally to hate other cultural styles and other races in order to bolster their own security and discharge their suppressed anger. They cling desperately to legal, pharisaical righteousness, but envy, jealousy and other branches on the tree of sin grow out of their fundamental insecurity…it is often necessary to convince sinners (even sinful Christians) of the grace and love of God toward them, before we can get them to look at their problems. Then the vision of grace and the sense of God’s forgiving acceptance may actually cure most of the problems. This may account for Paul’s frequent fusing of justification and sanctification” (Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life).

It is diffucult to find people who are both characteristically bold and humble at the same time. Bold people are usually not humble and humble people are usually not bold. Boldness and humility seem to be mutually exclusive character qualities—unless, of course, the boldness or humility evident in an individual is the result of the gospel’s activity. Only the gospel can produce people who are both bold and humble at the same time.

2 Timothy 1:6-12 is a text that is marked both by boldness and humility. In verse 7, Paul says to Timothy, “God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” He then exhorts Timothy not to “be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord…but to share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God” (2 Timothy 1:8). That’s bold talk, really bold talk. God gives power, love and self-control so that we need not be ashamed but able to share in suffering. Then, in verse 9, Paul tells Timothy that God did not save them because of their works “but because of His own purpose and grace” (2 Timothy 1:9). That’s humble talk, really humble talk. Paul says, “God did not save us because we are or have done anything special. No, He saved us because of His own grace.” So, on the one hand, Paul’s words to Timothy are bold words. On the other hand, those bold words are marked by deep humility. 2 Timothy 1:6-12 has much to teach us about Christian boldness—a boldness that is not lacking but excelling in humility. So, I want to answer three questions from 2 Timothy 1:6-12 regarding boldness.
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There is an interesting discussion going on over at Kingdom Come regarding gospel-centered preaching. Some of those commenting on Pastor Rob’s post are wrestling with what it really means to preach gospel-centered sermons and whether it is actually necessary. You can check it out here.