Simon, Simon, be warned, Satan has demanded permission to test you and break you. But I have prayed that your faith may not fail. After you return to Me, I want you to give courage and strength to your brothers.
—Jesus Christ (Luke 22:31-32, THV)
Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Deep in the Southern California desert lays a large pile of rocks that rise out of the lonely sands, standing in defiance against the pounding of the sun and the relentless change of the seasons. Those who visit this place know intuitively that they don’t belong; they walk as strangers in a strange land. It’s a forbidding place; a place to drift for a couple of hours, or maybe a day or two before leaving, thankful that they don’t have to make it their home. Those who come and go and think about where they have been depart with an uncertain feeling, not entirely sure they haven’t accidentally trespassed—having passed through a place where they were never welcomed, a space where they didn’t belong.
Joshua Tree National Park (as the pile of rocks is referred to today) strikes me as a place of leftovers—a dump of sorts—as if God haphazardly tossed piles of extra stone in the middle of this nowhere place; discarding them after He had constructed with care the mountains and valleys of the rest of the world. Even so, a certain beauty emerges from the desert floor in this place—but it is a beauty quite unlike any other. I’ve traveled the world and Joshua Tree looks like none of it; stark, barren, quiet, forsaken… a place where memories were abandoned long ago.
I find no mystery in the fact that humanity seeks to find itself in empty places such as this. We are instinctively drawn to raw spaces in search of ourselves or deep encounters with God who made us. With our lives now lost in an inescapable maze of instant messaging, cell phones, and the constant bombardment of media images from the most remote, bloodied, and broken corners of our world—is it any surprise that something in the innermost part of the soul beckons us to the quiet? It is so hard to see God when you are caught in six lanes of gridlocked traffic. It is so hard not to see God in the fading rays of a sunset over the desert. His presence is so obvious in the midst of the things He created… even in this random pile of boulders in Southern California.
In my life, I’ve left footprints in Joshua Tree three times, each visit transforming the contour of my life in completely different ways. Three short visits, each used by the One who created it to alter who I was to become—and am becoming—for eternity. It has never been a place to dwell, but more of a flash point, a point of contact, a place of impact that forever changes the course of my destiny even as the rocks themselves remain eternally unaffected.
The first time I laid eyes on Joshua Tree I was nearing the end of childhood—those obscure years between 6th and 8th grade. That season of life was highlighted by church camps and retreats where I had deeply connected with God. I was innocent; unadulterated by the darker side of the world. Life was good. The days were simple.
My first visit to Joshua Tree, however, was to mark the beginning of the end of such innocence. In the summer before my junior year of high school my family moved to a different state, seriously rattling my sense of stability. Desperate for the acceptance of new friends, I descended into a world where I allowed temptation and desire to quietly descend on my soul. At first ignorantly, and then with conscious abandon, I began to wander in the labyrinth of the world, with all its lies and deceit. Behind me lay the purity and simplicity of adolescent faith. Ahead lay a decade of twists and turns as I chased nearly every conceivable pleasure and pursuit.
In a vacuum constraint, my journey down this new found path accelerated during the years at college. Everything was more intense, everything came faster, everything more often. In the classroom I soaked in humanism and materialism. At night I partied with reckless abandon, never thinking of the consequences, focusing only on “fun at all costs.” I read philosophy books late into the night, my life being contorted by these new, profound, and enticing thoughts that bounced aimlessly in my hollow soul—an arrogant soul… my heart knowing only the strength of youth and none of the wisdom of age. In the company of the great philosophers I found words to sooth my conscience, justifying the creature I had become.
After college, I entered the “real world” with great pride and confidence, motivated by a fierce spirit of competition that spilled over into everything: athletics, motor sports, business, the gym… I had an obsession to achieve what the world held in high regard, wandering away from my deep connection with God. But my second visit to Joshua Tree, nearly twenty years after my first visit, would change all that.
In April of 2002, my extended family met together in Palm Springs for vacation. My parents, my sister, Karen, her husband, Todd, and their two children came from the east. We flew in from Seattle, where I was working for Microsoft. With me came my two kids— Jake, aged seven, and my daughter, Audrey, who was four—and a beautiful and faithful woman named Tiffany, my wife of ten years.
The years had not been easy on Tiffany. While her presence had a calming effect on many of the outward storms I created, I was far from the companion I had vowed to be the day we wed. For the past decade I had lingered comfortably between Christianity and complacency, the empty places being filled with work, sports, cars, travel, and alcohol. Only recently had I found myself on the edge of rediscovering my faith. I was beginning again with God, recapturing the peace and meaning I had known as a child. So perhaps it seemed logical to return to the place that represented the summation of my childhood belief… the place that marked the end of a great season of faith. My sister Karen remembers my decision to go back to Joshua Tree this way:
Nobody really wanted to go with Paul. I mean, why trade the pools and the air conditioning for the cactus and the blistering sun? But Paul was insistent and we all had learned not to fight his stubbornness. What Paul wanted, Paul got, one way or the other. And that day he wanted us all to go to Joshua Tree. He rallied us and we packed up the car for the one hour ride into the desert. We all agreed to go reluctantly—but also purposefully. We had been seeing some hope lately in Paul’s spiritual life, and he seemed drawn back to Joshua Tree—almost as if he were retracing his steps in some way.
Joshua Tree looked just as I had remembered it. Mountains of boulders, huge and small, jutted through the sands and towered above the scrub trees that had given the area its name. In the parking lot we gathered our gear and began to hike through the brush and cactus on a meandering trail toward a large rock outcropping. If anything was wrong at that point, none of us recognized it for what it might have been. Looking back, some of us recall feeling like something was a bit “off,” but we hiked on unconcerned.
At the base of the rocks my son, Jake, and I broke off from the group to climb higher. Pulling ourselves from boulder to boulder we worked our way up the side of a cliff. It was easy, it was fun, and the view got better each time we climbed a little higher.
Down on the desert floor, however, my brother-in-law, Todd, was experiencing something entirely different. He remembers it vividly:
After Paul and Jake separated from the group, I climbed with Tiffany, Karen, and the kids onto a big flat rock about six feet high. It’s hard to explain what happened next, but deep in my gut I was struck by a horrible feeling—a mixture of anxiety and fear that began to pulsate through my body. I thought something was wrong with me. It didn’t seem spiritual or mental… it felt physical and terrible. I was scared. First I thought I was having a heart attack, then I thought of the kids—something was going to happen to the kids. All I could think was “Let’s get these kids off this rock. Now!” I started yelling at Karen and Tiffany to get the kids down. My heart was beating; I was breathing hard; my mind was a blur of thoughts and emotions.
You need to understand that I’m never like this. I’m usually the calm one, the rational one. I’m the one with the PhD who teaches at a university, the one who tries to be solid. But here I was in the middle of the desert freaking out over nothing. Tiffany thought I was nuts. She and Karen started to make fun of me, calling me a “wimp,” telling me to get over it. But I couldn’t. Something was wrong, and for whatever reason, I could feel it…and the feeling was awful.
Even as we huddled together safe on the ground, the sense of danger remained intense. I felt compelled to pray for our protection. “Watch over us, Lord, watch over us…” But I didn’t think about Paul and Jake, not until I looked up and saw Jake seventy-five feet above us. “Oh God,” I thought, “Jake is going to fall…” and that’s when I heard Paul shout.
Above the group huddled below, Jake and I had climbed boulder by boulder until we were high above the desert floor. On a large, flat rock, about ten feet by ten feet, we had stopped briefly to take in the desert panorama that stretched out before us. It was beautiful; this is what I had come for. Jake stood near the edge while I walked back to the face of the cliff behind; I wanted to look over the top of the next rock to see if we wanted to go higher. To get high enough to see over, I stepped up onto a rock that was about eighteen inches wide at the base and rose to a point two feet high. With one hand lightly bracing me against the cliff, I stood on the pointed rock and peered over the top of the next ledge. Just a little too risky for my son, I thought. So I took my hand away from the cliff and began to step down off the small rock. There was nothing to this; a small step down onto a solid rock platform…
I have replayed the next events in my mind hundreds of times, each time trying to sort through the circumstances, trying to evaluate what happened, searching for some sort of natural explanation. But when I replay the details of those few fateful moments, earthly reason fails to explain what transpired.
As I made the small step down off the pointed rock, something moved, something lifted, something pushed… and I found myself momentarily horizontal, four feet in the air, looking down at the small rock I had used as a step. For an instant, my feet were at the same height as my head; for a fraction of a second time stood still as I lay parallel to the ground, suspended in mid-air. It was so surreally odd… incalculable. I remember thinking, “How did I get here? I was standing on a rock two feet high and now my entire body is four feet off the ground.” As soon as I finished that thought, I dropped straight down, my hands hitting the ten by ten rock and my right knee striking the pointed rock I had been standing on. I shouted in pain. When I stood up I saw minor puncture wounds in both my hands; but more worrisome, was a gaping puncture under the knee cap. The cut went very deep and was bleeding badly.
I was in fairly bad shape and knew that I would need help to get my son down from the rock platform to the safety of the desert floor seventy-five feet below. Walking out four or five steps to the edge of the rock platform, I saw the huddled group below to my left. We had climbed up the right side as it was a gradual ascent. The left side however, was an extreme drop, and I was surprised to be looking nearly straight down onto the tops of my family’s heads. I called down to Todd, asking him to help me get Jake down. Then, for whatever reason, I felt a little dizzy, so I backed clear away from the ledge, turned around, and put my hands on my knees. From this position, were I to pass out, I would have just fallen flat on the large flat rock, nearly six feet away from the edge. That’s the last thing I remember. The memories of the others on the ground, however, are vivid and haunting. The images imbedded in their memories have allowed me to piece together the details of the next moments and hours—details which, like the pieces of a mosaic, give the full picture of what happened that day. Tiffany, my wife remembers this way:
I had been giving Todd a hard time about his fear. He was acting like a total baby, really wigged out. But when Paul called down from the edge of the cliff, my immediate attention turned to my son Jake. Was he all right? What was happening up there? Never, in my wildest dreams or my darkest nightmares could I have envisioned what I saw at that moment.
The whole world seemed to go into slow motion. Karen and I screamed; Todd turned and gasped… There, cart-wheeling slowly through the air, was Paul, his limp body twisting like a rag doll as he fell from the rock seventy-five feet above us. We lost sight of him a few feet before the point of impact, about thirty feet above our heads. The sound was awful, a hollow, deep thud… And then I heard nothing. I yelled at my son to stay put and began scrambling up the boulders, certain that I would find Paul dead. When I reached him, he was face down, his body twisted and distorted.
His right arm was contorted so far behind him that I thought it might have been torn off. The skin and scalp had been pulled away from about a quarter of his forehead, revealing the white of his skull. Dead? Alive? Dieing? I rolled him over. He breathed; I breathed, and somehow I knew it would be okay. I asked him to look at me, but his left eye was rolled so far back in his head all I could see was white. I asked him if he knew his name; he said “Paul.” I asked him if he knew where he was; he said “Joshua Tree.” I asked him to look at me and he kept saying “I am…” but his left eye never moved. The left side of his face was so bloody. I was terrified that so many parts of him were broken.
Karen, my sister, remembers the events this way:
Tiffany and I had bounded over the boulders like mountain goats and she got to Paul first. I remember wanting so badly to get to him—yet at the same time not wanting to get to him; so afraid of what I would find. To this day I don’t like to think about it, actually. It was all so unreal. As soon as I got to him, Tiffany went up to get Jake to safety. I held Paul in my arms, and gazed into his eyes, but nothing looked back. My thoughts raced. He’s not here. No, he’s here, just unconscious. Is he still here? In the confusion, however, one thing was very clear: I had never realized how much I loved him. As my brother, I had always taken him for granted; always letting the little things bug me… but not at that moment. I wrapped his mangled head in my shirt and held him in my arms, overwhelmed by my affections. As we sat, all I could say was “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…” How much time went by as the two of us sat there alone? I have no idea. All I knew was that I loved my brother. All I could say was“Jesus, Jesus…”
As Karen held me, I drifted in and out of consciousness. Tiffany had climbed up to get Jake and brought him back down to Karen and me. Karen then took Jake down to where the others were waiting, leaving Tiffany alone with me again. She assessed the situation this way:
The children were hysterical; crying, screaming. Our daughter kept yelling from the level ground below, “A snake bit Daddy! A snake bit Daddy!” Todd had already left to find help. I told Karen to get the kids out of there, which she did, leaving me alone with my husband. For a moment I was able to catch my breath and collect my thoughts.
Paul looked bad. Blood was everywhere. A large flap of skin had been peeled from his scalp. Veins and clumps of fat hung from the wounds. I tried to get him to look at me, but he said “I can’t.” I tried to keep him awake but he said “I don’t want to.” He kept saying “The wind was weird… I bonked my knee… Something pushed me… the wind was weird…” I look back at it all now and it all seems like a blur. Here I was, holding a horribly disfigured man, a man I loved, alone in this forbidden desert… and I had to wonder, “Was this my fault?”
Over the years I had been praying for Paul. He was such a bulldozer. He was a good guy, but he was totally out for himself. The kids and I were such a distant second—and God wasn’t even in the picture. Our lives tumbled in the wake of his life. Soccer, work, cars, motorcycles, his friends… it was all about him and it was very difficult. My brother called him “an impossible nut to crack, a human superman…” I tried to get him to church, but it didn’t take long to realize that I couldn’t change him. So I turned to prayer. I prayed for three years that God would do something huge, because only something huge would work on Paul. There had been small glimmers of hope, baby steps in the right direction; but as I held him in my arms, I wondered if this wasn’t the huge thing I had prayed for—and I wondered if I wasn’t somehow responsible.
Like the others, Todd jumped into immediate action. As he replays the event in his mind, these are the things he recalls:
Right after the fall, I ran for help. Because we were so remote, I thought the nearest help might be hours away. I was wrong. The people that God placed in the desert that day… it was miraculous. As I ran for the car, I found two climbers just beyond the next rock outcropping and yelled to them for help. One of them was a trauma surgeon who just “happened” to have a neck brace in his car. The other was a first responder with a backboard. In the nearest parking lot a rescue ranger with a van full of students had just pulled up. They had come to further their training in first-aid and wilderness rescue. Of the fifty people that “showed up” to help, thirty-five of them were medically trained. Tiffany said they just kept appearing out of the bushes. Many of the rescuers, however, were preparing us for the worst, using words like “brain damage, paralysis, internal bleeding, alive but not out of the woods.” A group had gathered to pray at the base of the rocks where we had left the kids. The rescuers had formed a line from the accident site thirty feet up to a clearing down on the desert floor. A chain of people carefully lowered Paul off those rocks, taking him to the clearing where the helicopter picked him up.
As the dust settled, I waited behind to help clean up and fill out reports. I walked back to the cliff with a member of the rescue team, one who was well seasoned in Joshua Tree—and someone who knew the consequences for those who fell there. He looked at the rocks with disbelief. “Drop one hundred people off of that,” he said, “and one hundred will die.” Together we were able to piece together the details of the fall: Paul had fallen from the ten by ten flat rock seventy-five feet above the desert floor, glanced off of two outcroppings and landed headfirst on solid rock forty-five feet below.
“…Drop one hundred people off of that and one hundred will die… one hundred will die…” In the commotion I was left without a ride back to Palm Springs. I hitched a ride to the park entrance where we arranged for Karen to come back to pick me up. With two hours to wait and think, the events of the day began to settle in my mind—and certain unanswerable questions began to lead me to some unsettling conclusions. First, it made absolutely no sense that Paul should have fallen. Paul is an incredible athlete; an excellent soccer player, gifted football player, a weight lifter in perfect condition. Paul was a jock; tough, strong, and highly coordinated. That he would fall by accident in such an easy situation was unthinkable. Then there were the screams of his daughter, “A snake bit Daddy.” What was I to make of that? She had no prior fear or awareness of snakes and none were seen or talked about that day. Most disturbing, however, was the deep premonition of evil and fear that I had in the minutes before the fall. In the flurry of the rescue I hadn’t had time to draw a connection between those two events. But now, with some time to put it all together, I realized that the very moment that I thought Jake was going to fall, Paul had unexplainably “slipped.” I had to conclude that something happened up on the rock that day. I wasn’t sure what, but something happened.
I wasn’t sure of what had happened either. As I lay on the rocks, consciousness slowly returned, but it was like a fog retreating into the night. I began to hear, but wished I could not. I heard the screams of my four year old daughter: “Daddy’s dead! A snake bit Daddy! My Daddy is dead!” It wasn’t the standard scream of a young child, but a scream that pierces your soul. I listened to the voice of my wife, Tiffany, her words so shaken—holding back tears and offering uncertain comfort. My wife is very strong in emergencies, so when I heard the fear in her voice I knew I was in bad shape. “I’m here, Paul. I’m here…” she managed to say.
Her broken voice began to answer the questions of other voices—unfamiliar, professional, questioning type voices: “Let me look at him, Ma’am… Can you tell me how high? Paul, can you feel this?” I tried to look at the voices, but the visual world was a blur of painfully distorted images, and so I held them tightly shut. The number of voices continued to grow, punctuated now by the crackle of radios. I lay helplessly on the unforgiving rocks for hours. One moment I felt like I had died, then briefly brought back to life, only to feel myself sliding on a slope toward death again. I didn’t want to leave my family; I didn’t want my life to end at such a young age. Yet in the midst of all the chaos—in great defiance to the circumstances— a deep peace was felt in my soul—a remarkable peace. I felt my life’s journey on this world was ending, that a new journey was about to begin, yet there was peace in the midst of confusion. It’s hard to describe the feeling, but what a blessing it was in those hours.
Eventually I felt my body being carefully moved and lifted, followed by the cool sensation of metal against my back. I heard the sound of duct tape as my limbs and head were immobilized against the backboard. The voices began to carry me through the rocks. I sensed the movement and I saw shadows moving about me, but they didn’t seem to match up with anything in my mind. My sight was returning slowly and as it did everything looked different. Even things that were familiar and recognizable seemed… different.
They gently placed me on the sand and many minutes passed as we waited for transport. Soon I heard the chop of blades cutting through the dry air, followed by a blast of dust and a new set of voices.
They loaded me up and Tiffany jumped in. As the ground fell away below us I felt a surge of disorientation, claustrophobia, and pain. My body tensed and heaved as we flew through the turbulent desert air, but the strange and powerful sense of calm that had descended on my heart continued. I can’t explain it, but the peace was complete and it was nearly perfect.
As we landed at the hospital and entered the world of white coats and florescent lights, Tiffany had to face our uncertain future:
The helicopter flight was followed by a frantic series of tests at the hospital including X-rays and CT scans. That Paul was even alive seemed miraculous to me. Now I awaited the diagnosis as they finished cleaning his wounds and stapling him back together. As I sat beside his bed in the ER, a stream of doctors flowed in and out of the curtain. Some left shaking their heads; others were talking under their breath. Finally I had to ask what was going on.
“Haven’t you heard?” the doctor said. “He’s known around here as ‘Miracle Boy.’ Listen, we have no idea what happened, but we know we aren’t the only ones at work here. Your husband’s tests have come back perfectly clear, all of them. Nothing, nothing, nothing. No broken bones, no fractures, no internal bleeding, The CT scan indicates that his brain hasn’t even registered trauma. You are welcome to stay in a guest bed tonight and we can observe him if you want, but your insurance isn’t going to cover it, because there is nothing medically wrong with your husband.”
I could never put to words the emotions that flooded over me. How do you process something like that? It was all so overwhelming. What was I to make of the accident itself, let alone this news? The only injuries seemed to have come from the two times he glanced off the wall of the cliff. There appeared to be no damage at all from the force of the final impact. It was incredible!
While I was still in the ER I took a call from my mom. She had gotten a very brief message but she knew none of the details of the accident. “I don’t know why,” she said immediately, “But after Todd called, I started praying. I felt like Satan was trying to take Paul’s life but God said, ‘No, he is Mine.’”
After only 4 ½ hours in the hospital, we were released and went home.
From this side of the grave, we will never know for absolute certain the spiritual details of that day. Time, however, has only reinforced in my mind a Scriptural interpretation of what took place. The final chapters of the Bible paint a picture of things evil and good, the conflict that exists between them, and how this clash is reflected in the events of earth—past, present, and future. The book of Revelation, in particular, presents graphic images of unseen spiritual realities that impact the domain of the physical:
And there was war in heaven, Michael and his angels waging war with the dragon… and the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to earth, and his angels were thrown down with him… Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, knowing that he has only a short time… So the dragon was enraged… and went off to make war against the rest of the children, who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.
Had those who were in Joshua Tree been able to see into the spiritual realm that day, they would have seen an extension of this greater war. I believe they would have seen the angels of protection around us. I believe that they would have seen that protection temporarily withheld, that they would have seen Him allow a brief and limited assault by demonic forces. I believe they would have seen my feet being swept out from beneath me as I stepped down from the ledge, and moments later observed me being pushed from the heights by demons. And then, I believe they would have seen me being caught by angels of light on the surface of the rocks below. My brother-in-law sensed it. I think my daughter may have seen it. I’m certain my mother-in-law recognized it for what it was.
Time has also shown me some of the purposes of God in ordaining such things for my good… good that could only have come from something as dark as this. My life went over the edge that day, in so many ways. My body went over the edge physically, of course. But my soul was pushed over the edge as well, as my beliefs were awakened by the violent impact of the rocks. In deep and highly pragmatic ways, the fall catapulted me into a completely different paradigm for interpreting all of life, an entirely new way of seeing. The fall marked the beginning of a new season of transformation that has—and continues—to shape me into the man God created me to be as He now pushes me over the edge every moment of every day, conforming me to the image of His Son.
Why I was singled out to be specifically targeted by evil in this way, I’ll never know. Why did God choose to save me, rather than end my life in the desert? I have no answer. The fact is that there is nothing special about me. The truth is that there is something special about all of us. We are each objects of the great love of God, targets of His attention and affections. As children of the One who is good, Satan has turned his wrath for the Most High toward us, “making war” against those God so deeply loves. The war is literal, not figurative. The enemy is real and tangible, not symbolic or metaphorical. And while the attack is individual, God’s provision and protection is personal, allowing us to be wounded only for a greater healing.
At the end of the day, it’s not a question about what happened to me. (Feel free to interpret my story as you wish.) The critical factor has to do with what is happening to you, and what you desire to see develop in your story. The Bible is very, very clear about the nature of the war, the war that encompasses everything around you and within you. The battles permeate the most significant areas of your existence, impacting the issues of faith, life, and love that matter the most.
Ultimately it’s not about my story or your story. It’s about God’s story. To seek your story within His story is the beginning of a vital journey, a journey out of the personal desert common to all humanity. Each of us clings to an innate drive to understand the meaning of life. We yearn to make sense of pain and desire, hoping to get a chance to see “life” and “self” for what they are. The journey commences as we ponder God, stepping past current boundaries of perception and “seeing” everything that exists through new lenses— with eyes that recognize spiritual realities in the physical world. For when one begins to look at the world in this way—in a way that reflects both physical and spiritual realities—life will be truly pushed over the edge… but in all the right places, never to be the same again.